


Violet Leiman and the Order of the Sacred Flame

by Drakey



Series: Luke Restimen and The Cruelty of Fate [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Firestarters, HP: Epilogue Compliant, Homosexuality, Horcrux Malfunction, I am mean to my characters, Indecisiveness, Original Character(s), Quidditch, Scheming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-24
Updated: 2013-08-24
Packaged: 2017-12-24 11:59:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 51,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/939768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Drakey/pseuds/Drakey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While most other boys his age deal with schoolwork and trying to figure out girls, Luke Restimen must deal with more diverse problems: Everyone still thinks he's evil, his arch-nemesis basically worships the ground he walks on, someone is framing him for attacks on Quidditch players, he can't sort out how he really feels about one of his closest friends, and he's been recruited to the Quidditch team. </p><p>Naturally, one of his other best friends chooses these trying times to start bursting into flames for no apparent reason.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Flying Sociopaths With Great Big Wooden Truncheons

**Author's Note:**

> Once again, NaNoWriMo. This one is from 2011. The Slytherin common room is basically all my invention based on the very little written information I had. Any architectural quirks of Hogwarts that are different from canon can be assumed to be because of... 
> 
> hm...
> 
> Let's go with gremlins. Gremlins were rearranging the school.

Myrtle was innocent.

This, above all, filled him... not quite with regret, but with... shame, perhaps. She had done nothing to him, but she was lying on the floor at his feet, and he was wondering if maybe he was doing the wrong thing.

Well, not quite wondering if he was doing the wrong thing, after all, what he was doing was certainly objectively wrong, but maybe it was the wrong way to go about gaining power, too. But the ritual had to be completed, the horcrux made. He pulled his cowl off of his head and bent down beside her, kneeling next to the girl that he had killed through his own will, if not by his own hand.

His father was dead, but no car crash would take him. He would be immortal. He would find a better way, a path to true invulnerability, soon enough, but for now...

\------------------

"Luke!"

Luke Restimen, age twelve and one quarter, sometime resident of 2143 Manor Road, Stoughton, and full-time carrier of a fragment of the soul of Thomas Marvolo Riddle, woke up and stared at his mother. She wasn't beating him with a pillow, which could mean any number of things.

"What?" Luke said, and Anna Lee Restimen smiled. "Right," Luke said. "Teddy. How long have we got?"

"About an hour," Anna Lee replied. "Mister Longbottom is already here, though."

Luke nodded. That made sense. Professor Longbottom, Professor Shelly, and Professor Gills had all spent an inordinate amount of time at his house over the summer. Thankfully, he had been free of Harry Potter intrusions. Probably something to do with the endless stream of headlines about which Luke was certainly not smug, no sir. He hadn't seen Professor Leiman all summer. This was to be expected. Professor Leiman had offered thirty house points to any student who could tell him where he was all summer by November. No one would be getting those points.

Luke got up and dragged himself out into the living room, where Professor Longbottom was sitting on the couch, drinking a cup of tea. He greeted Luke as Luke wandered through the living room. For about a week before he met Professor Longbottom's wife, Luke had been sure that the professor was romancing his mother, and had been all set to move to a house in the middle of a bunch of wizarding homes (though he hadn't been sure how he would have liked being Luke Restimen-Longbottom, which sounded as though it could lead to teasing) and maybe even end up living by Teddy or Marissa or Mark or Violet. Instead, the attempts at romance had come from Professor Gills, of all people. They had been thoroughly rebuffed. Something about Professor Gills being a "spying, Potter-helping bastard whose presence is only tolerated because of his usefulness to Luke."

Professor Gills hadn't been around in about a month.

Luke got fresh clothes out of the basket his mother had washed yesterday and went to go shower. By the time he was cleaned up, dressed, and fed, Teddy had arrived, and it was time to go.

Professor Longbottom stood up and took one boy in each hand. Luke found traveling with him the most disconcerting out of all the teachers. He had to concentrate before he apparated, and the sensation always felt more like being shoved through a letterbox than usual. Still, when they arrived at Diagon Alley, all the discomfort and nervousness of apparation vanished like a soap bubble. Weasley's Wizard Wheezes was decked out in bright green and silver, selling masks that looked like Luke. George Weasley had come to his house to offer him a hundred and fifty galleons to model for the masks. Luke had asked for ten percent of the profits, instead. There had been a session of fierce negotiations, and now Luke received about three galleons a month from the store. He was temped to go in and buy one of the masks, and made a note to ask Professor Longbottom if he could. First, though, he had to go and get fitted for new robes, and then there would be a little bit of book shopping, and Luke needed a new set of notebooks and a cauldron, and they would be meeting with Violet and Professor Shelly around noon, so there were things to do first.

The first stop was Gringotts, and then it was Madam Malkin's and then Flourish and Blott's, and Luke cast a look of longing at the pet shop, but Professor Longbottom steered him firmly away with a muttered "Pets are more trouble than they're worth, you just lose them all the time."

They finally sat down at Florean Fortescue's Ice Cream Parlor and waited. 

And waited.

And waited.

Finally, after Luke's third bowl of golden-apple-crackle and Teddy's third bowl of mint-chocolate-frog (it squirmed in a truly disturbing way), there was a pop of apparation and Professor Shelly appeared, alone, in the street nearby.

She looked a bit scorched. 

Professor Longbottom stood up and exclaimed "Shelly! What happened?"

She shook her head. "Nothing too awful," she said. "But Violet's stuck at home for the day, I'm afraid. She's having some little... issues."

"Is she all right?" Teddy asked nervously.

Professor Shelly nodded. "She's just had a bit of a magic accident. Burned my living room a fair bit, actually, but her father was in town at the time, so he could control it."

"And you couldn't?" Professor Longbottom said. "You're one of the most powerful witches I know, Shelly. How bad was it?"

"It was better than it could have been, but it didn't have to happen at all," Professor Shelly replied."There's a reason I divorced Andrew. He provoked the whole bloody thing." She took a deep breath. "Sorry," she said. "Old issue, I shouldn't be bothering you with it. Just telling you to stop waiting around."

Professor Longbottom nodded. "All right," he said. "Best wishes on that, then. Be careful, will you?"

\--------------------

Violet looked just fine when Luke saw her on Platform nine and three quarters that Wednesday. She was, perhaps, a little jumpy, but no worse than that. She was already deep in conversation with Mark when he got there, and she glanced up at him and then looked back to find that Mark was no longer directly in front of her.

He was instead running towards Luke.

The last time Luke had seen Mark, the diminutive Hufflepuff had been soaked to the bone, enjoying one of the few really warm days of the summer, splashing in the pool at Luke's apartment complex. Not one iota of his enthusiasm seemed to have worn off, and he rushed up and locked Luke in a tight bear hug as though they hadn't seen each other in years, rather than weeks. 

"Hello, Mark," Luke said. He reached up and tousled the cinnamon colored hair. "You're getting a little shaggy," Luke observed cheerfully. "Didn't your mum say she was going to make you cut it before you left for the platform?"

Mark shook his head. "No," he said. "She was going to, but dad got her to change her mind. Something about it curling up in the back. I missed you."

Luke stifled a laugh. That kind of odd, lurching subject change had been missing from his life for entirely too long, and he was glad to have it back.

"What am I?" Violet said from behind Mark. "Chopped gurdyroot?"

"No," Mark said, "you're Violet."

Luke rolled his eyes. Mark was trying to be funny, with the same near-success as always. He smiled, and Luke dutifully said "heh" and turned to Violet. "How are you doing?" he said.

Violet sighed. "Please don't. I'm fine, all right. My dad came by, and there was a little bit of an incident, but I got over it, and it's all under control now, so please don't worry about it."

Luke shrugged. "All right. I got you a souvenir, by the way." He reached into his trunk and pulled out a box from Weasley's Wizard Wheezes. Violet let out a blustery sigh.

"You got me a mask that looks like you," she said.

Luke grinned. "It seemed like the sort of thing you would want to have around." He was about to say more, probably something in the vein of a snarky comment, when a pair of hands was clapped over his eyes.

"Guess who," Marissa said from behind him.

"Teddy?" Luke said.

There was an irritated snort and the hands dropped. "I am not Teddy," Marissa said. "I am more feminine than he could ever be."

"I don't know," Violet said. "Teddy can grow breasts on command."

"And the minute he figures that out, we'll lose him," Marissa said. "He'll grow himself a pair of breasts, and he'll never leave the dormitories again."

"At least we won't have to deal with him flashing his hair like a strobe light again," Luke said. "That was really obnoxious."

They headed for the train together, Marissa slipping her hand into Luke's. They had only seen each other once over the summer--Marissa's mother didn't like to go out very often--and Luke thought that a little bit of physical contact could be forgiven, even if his mother was watching from somewhere behind him. 

Anna Lee, for her part, would probably draw the wrong conclusion--Luke and Marissa were very pointedly not boyfriend and girlfriend, although that was Luke's choice rather than Marissa's. His life was chaotic enough, thank you very much, and he'd just as soon not add figuring out how to snog to his list of worries any sooner than he had to. Still, he had kissed her that one time, and the least he could do was be nice and hold her hand.

The four of them made their way into the train and found a compartment occupied by a twelve-year-old boy with a magnificent green beard, whereupon they all told Teddy to knock it off, that it wasn't as funny as he thought it was, and he told them that it was so, and they all settled in for the long ride to Hogwarts, chatting and laughing and fooling around and having a good time. Teddy broke out the Exploding Snap cards, and Mark broke out the gobstones, and Marissa and Violet sighed and got out books, but really, it wasn't that long before the boys got tired of being exploded or sprayed, and they switched to Scrabble, which all five of them played enthusiastically, and which Teddy won handily after he managed to get "vasexcoricate" on a triple word score, and with it being an incantation, it was already worth double points, so he got nearly two hundred points on a single word, at which point everyone else just sort of gave up and started cooperating to put down as many dirty words as possible.

They were on their third argument about whether or not it was legal to use "Merlin-assed" when the train came to a stop and Teddy put away the board. 

They all stepped out onto the platform at Hogsmeade station and followed the general flow of students. In the bustle and hustle, Mark got way ahead of them and managed to secure one of the thestral-drawn carriages for the five of them. Luke suppressed a shudder at the sight of the skeletal horses. He didn't like them, because they reminded him of his father's death, a fact that might have had something to do with his father's death being the only reason that he could see them. The Thestrals themselves were amiable enough. Luke had forced himself to learn about them after he found out what they were, but it took a conscious effort to not be afraid of them. He stepped forwards, reached out and patted one of them on the nose before climbing into the carriage. 

The key to getting five people into a Hogwarts carriage was to have the last two get on at the same time, because otherwise the thestrals would start moving before the fifth one could get on. They were trained to take groups of four, so they took groups of four, and you had to be crafty to fool them, but not all that crafty. Luke, Marissa, Teddy, Violet, and Mark piled into the carriage and it trundled off towards the castle. The League of Interhouse Friendship was coming home.

\----------------------

Professor Leiman stepped into the Great Hall, and all of the students turned and let out a little gasp as one. The Potions professor was limping more thoroughly than usual, and his face, normally clean-shaven, was covered in a thick, somewhat unkempt beard, well on the white side of grey. It was a bit shocking to Luke to see such a sign of age on the man. Certainly, Leiman was old. Luke knew for a fact that he was at least seventy-four. But it was one thing to know that he was old, and another thing entirely to see it displayed so clearly. Grey hair and a lined face, certainly. These were signs of wisdom, but for the first time, it hit Luke emotionally as well as intellectually that his favorite teacher was nearly seven times his own age.

It didn't help that Leiman was soaked to the bone, as though he had swum across the lake to be there. There was a bit of water weed tangled around his right leg. The only person in the entire hall who wasn't staring in goggle-eyed fascination was Professor Shelly, who was, instead, trying very hard not to laugh as her father in law stepped squishily up to the head table and rapped his (still dripping) cane once on the floor. A stool appeared in front of him and he watched as Hagrid stepped forward and delicately placed the Sorting Hat on top of the stool. Even the hat seemed a bit put off by Professor Leiman's appearance, and it gave him a strange look, or angled itself curiously towards him, at any rate, before it turned back to the bewildered first years stepping into the Great Hall. A wide rip along its brim opened and it rasped into song.

"Welcome to the Hogwarts School  
where you will learn to be  
a cunning witch both strong and proud,  
or master wizardry!

"Hogwarts is the only place  
to find a hat like me  
for when I sit upon your brow  
I can so clearly see;

"Do you belong in Hufflepuff  
to fairly earn your keep  
where friends will not abandon you  
through trouble small or deep?

"Or maybe you're for Slytherin  
the house of Salazar--  
a place where you will learn to use  
the politics of power.

"Perhaps the house of Ravenclaw  
is really more your speed,  
to sit and think and ponder while  
your brains grow like a weed.

"And still, it could be Gryffindor,  
the house of bold intent,  
where you may find your path will lead  
to where heroes are sent.

"So put me on your head and wait  
until you hear my voice,  
and I will tell you where to go:  
I'll make the proper choice!"

Luke pushed down an urge to applaud for the hat's song. No one had applauded in his first year, and he was damned if he was going to be embarrassed at two sortings in a row.

There was a moment of silence before Professor Leiman sneezed hugely and then called out "Anderson, Steven," and a little boy practically ran up to the stool and had the singed old sorting hat placed on his head by the intensely damp professor. 

The hat hmmed and hummed and ummed for a few moments and then announced, loudly, "Gryffindor!" and the sorting was begun.

Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Gryffindor again, Hufflepuff, Gryffindor, Hufflepuff... It took quite a while, but eventually, on "Finch-Fletchley, Lennox" the Slytherins gained a new member. 

Luke had barely gotten past wondering who in the hell names their son Lennox when the boy in question plopped down imperiously next to him--between him and Marissa, in fact--and said in very precise I-have-a-speaking-coach tones, "Hello, Mister Restimen."

 _Oh right,_ Luke thought. _I'm famous now._ "Hello, Lennox," he said. "You're sitting between me and my friend."

Lennox Finch-Fletchley smiled. "Am I?" he said. "Or am I your newest friend?"

Luke gave him the darkest look he could muster and opened his mouth to reply, but before he could get so much as a sound out, Marissa tapped the boy on the shoulder, and when he turned around, she said, "One side, half-pint."

Lennox's mouth formed a neat little "o" and he got up and switched over to Luke's other side.

None of the other new Slytherins tried that, but they did all end up fairly close to Luke. This would have been a problem if there were more than six total students sorted into Slytherin. Luke hadn't noticed the year before just how incredibly small Slytherin was compared to the other houses. It wasn't as though Hogwarts was packed to the gills with children, but it did host quite a few of them, and significantly less than a quarter were Slytherins. Conversely, Gryffindor seemed to account for nearly a third of the students, especially in the upper years. Luke recalled Professor Leiman's advice to the students the year before. "I would also advise you not to try to choose your house, as the hat tends to know what it is doing. And besides that, ever since that whole Voldemort business, the poor Slytherins have been getting very lonely." The old American hadn't been lying. Luke made a little mental note to see if he could figure out something to do that would make it clear that Slytherin wasn't evil. 

He glanced up across the table at Hieronymus Runel, the second year's most notorious bully and, up until the middle of February last year, Luke's personal rival. That rivalry had been replaced by an unsettling sort of fawning that Luke didn't much care for at all, with Runel trying to gain the favor of a dark lord that simply didn't exist anymore. He had been tempted on a couple of occasions to simply order the other boy to start bullying him again, but that might result in worse things than Luke continuing to feel really guilty over having used an unforgivable curse on him. 

Luke's life could get pretty surreal sometimes.

After the last student (Siward, Hecate: Slytherin) was sorted, Professor Flitwick stood up at the head table and began his speech. It was functionally identical to the one Luke had heard the year before, and he tuned it out. No going in the Forbidden Forest (who would have guessed it?), no letting Filch catch you with contraband, don't play with the swamp on the fourth floor, so on and so forth. For a moment, Luke wondered if Flitwick was going to say something about not bullying the potentially-lethally-dangerous Slytherin who had nearly killed another student last year, but of course, that would have been far too common sense. Luke decided that he would have to put out a notice. Something along the lines of "don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry."

Professor Flitwick finished his speech and climbed down off of his chair, and food appeared on the tables and Luke dug in, starting out with sausages and moving on from there while the first years, from Finch-Fletchley to Siward, watched him like a flock of hawks. He finally got sick of the stares around the middle of his second helping and he dropped his fork, whirled to his right, and brought his hands up, extended like claws towards Lennox. "Oogity boogity!" he shouted, and Lennox, along with two of the other first years and Harry Wethering, one of the other three boys in Luke's year, fell off of their seats.

Runel started laughing. Luke shot him a look, and his mouth clamped shut. 

"Are we done watching me like I'm going to catch flame at any moment now?" Luke said.

"Probably not," Marissa put in helpfully from beside him, and Luke sighed. She was probably right. 

Still, the stares at least became less overt, and Luke ate in relative peace until it was time to go down to the common room. 

The password this time around was "Serpent Tongue", which was completely unsurprising to Luke. It was a poorly kept secret that the Slytherin passwords went in a cycle. What the cycle was, on the other hand, was harder to figure out, but you had to be cunning, and if rumor was to be believed, a little bit twisted to get it. Luke headed into the common room and smiled. Even if it was usually full of bigoted weirdos, the Slytherin common room was one of Luke's favorite places in the whole world. 

Fourteen doors set into the walls led off to the fourteen dormitories, girls first through seventh year on the left, and boys on the right. The dormitories were large enough that a sufficiently skilled student could achieve near-total privacy, although to really accomplish privacy, you needed to be in the fourth year or above, or else exceptionally well-trained, neither of which described Luke. A fire was already burning in the fireplace in the corner furthest from the lake. It had taken Luke a week to discover that the Slytherin common room actually extended out into the lake, along with the dormitories. Rumor had it that the third year girls and the fifth year boys both got big windows in their dormitories that looked out into the icy water, but whether that was true or not, everyone else had to make do with small windows about ten feet off the floor above the bookshelves, against which the giant squid would occasionally slap a tentacle just to see if anyone was paying attention. This had happened so often over the years that the scratched and algae-covered windows admitted only a general greenness during the daytime, to admittedly very pretty effect. Luke had read about a school in America that was out on a rock in the middle of a large lake, and half of which was completely submerged, with big, magically reinforced windows that looked out on fish swimming by and so on. He alternated between extreme jealousy of those students and gratitude that he didn't have big, physically impossible windows to worry about. He flopped himself down in a big, squashy armchair. A prefect started to object, looked at him, and then turned and found another chair. 

"I missed this place," Luke said, and then he reached into his robes and pulled out a paperback he'd bought specifically to piss off the other Slytherins. He cracked open Terry Pratchett's The Colour of Magic and started reading.

Luke was just beginning to really like Rincewind when a dark voice said "You know magic doesn't have a color, right?"

He peered out over the top of the book and found himself face to face with Phineas Chenner, the captain of the Slytherin quidditch team. "Actually," Luke said, "It does. Magic generally glows octarine, the eighth color of the spectrum. Of course, since we don't live on the Discworld, we can't see octarine light, which is just as well, because Hogwarts is so incredibly magical that I imagine we'd all be blinded by it."

Phineas gave him a blank look."Right," he said. "You know, I think you ought to try out for the quidditch team. You're built like a keeper."

This was patently untrue. Even Luke, who had attended a grand total of five quidditch games in his entire life, knew that keepers were usually built wider than your average six-lane highway. "Thank you for trying to flatter me," he said, "but try at least recruiting me for a position where I'd be useful. And if you don't make me try out, you'll wish I really was Voldemort."

"Oh," Phineas said. "You're pretty good on a broomstick, the way I hear it. Chaser?"

"I'll be at tryouts," Luke said.

\------------------------

Professor Leiman was back to normal by the time potions classes began. The scraggly beard was gone, his hair was perfectly ordered, and he smelled nothing like fish, although the lingering odor was still attached to his chair. 

There were, once again, three cauldrons on his desk. He smiled and waved his cane at them, and they turned clear. One was filled with a bright blue liquid, one was filled with a violent yellow, and one was filled with what looked like black sand.

"All right, class," he said. "We've been through this sort of exercise before. Who can tell me what this is?" He pointed to the blue.

A hand went up in the back of the class and Professor Leiman pointed. the Gryffindor boy he had called on said "It's Limbrot potion."

"Quite correct!" Professor Leiman said. He pointed to Luke. "Restimen, come and take a whiff of the powder here and then tell me what it is."

Luke stepped up. Professor Leiman was always having him do things like this, even though he wasn't the best student and didn't quite get it right all the time. He took a deep whiff of the black powder though, and he immediately knew what it was. "Gunpowder," he said. "Enough to kill us all if you dropped a match into it."

"Hardly," Professor Leiman said. "This isn't very potent gunpowder, and I've made sure not to pack it tightly, and there's a number of very interesting charms on it, but yes, it would certainly ruin all of our days if it were to go off." He waved Luke back to his seat and pointed to the final cauldron. "Can anyone tell me what this is?"

There was a long silence as everyone racked their brains for dangerous potions that were that color. Finally, Marissa raised her hand. "It looks like Pepperup potion to me."

"That," Professor Leiman said, "is exactly right. Now, for our lesson today, there is effectively no difference between these things. If you are not careful with the preparation, handling, or use of them, they can all kill you. Up until this year, we have worked with potions that would cause nothing worse than food poisoning, but potioneering becomes dangerous very early. If you mix Pepperup wrong, it can explode and you can die. If you drop a match into gunpowder, it will explode, and you may die. if you so much as touch Limbrot potion, you will wish it had exploded for the twenty minutes before you die." He waved his cane at the cauldrons. The two filled with liquid floated away to a shelf, and the gunpowder stayed on the desk. "Today," he said, "we will be mixing gunpowder, so as to learn the proper amount of care. Wands out."

Everyone scrambled to pull out their wands and Professor Leiman waited patiently. It didn't take long. 

"Repeat the following incantation after me. Disactus Discendio Nunractus."

The class repeated the incantation. For a moment, Luke felt his lungs stop working. He was still breathing, but it wasn't doing any good. Judging from the noises around him, the whole class had felt the same sensation, but it lifted after about three seconds, so he wasn't too worried. 

"Now," Professor Leiman said. "Any dangerous chemical reactions will not occur However, I am monitoring the spell itself. Every time that it prevents a reaction, I will point at the student who was nearly killed and they will feel pain and lose one house point, because they have just died. Needless to say, anyone caught mixing gunpowder outside of class will be expelled. Not given detention, not reported to the headmaster, expelled. If any student makes it through this class without doing something that would have killed them and all the rest of us if not for the spell, they will earn thirty house points. Please open your Anarchist's Cookbooks now."

Luke earned thirty house points. Everyone else in Slytherin died at least three times. Violet managed to almost earn thirty house points, but she managed to get herself "killed" about five minutes before the end of the lesson. Luke managed to make less than a third the amount of gunpowder that everyone else did. Professor Leiman praised him profusely for not being stupid, and then he sent them off to Charms.

\--------------------------

Professor Gills was his usual friendly self, which was to say that he treated the Slytherins with something approaching deference and the Ravenclaws like he was trying to decide who he disliked the most and who would be his token Good Pupil for the year. Luke had the impression that this was much better than most heads of Slytherin behaved, so he didn't complain too much. Professor Gills ran them through a few basic instructions just to make sure that they all remembered not to point their wands at the faces, and then Luke, Teddy, and Marissa spent the next fifty minutes trying to turn china plates unbreakable. Marissa's plates kept breaking as soon as she cast the spell, and Luke leaned over to watch her wandwork.

"There's your problem," he said after a few moment. "It's supposed to be your ring finger under the wand for this spell, but your pinky needs to be on the other side, too. Like this." He took her hand in his and carefully corrected her grip, and she smiled and tried the spell again. The plate didn't break, and Luke picked it up and smacked it smartly against the table. It made a dull gonging sound and remained perfectly unbroken right up until he put it down, at which point a fine network of cracks formed over it and it fell to pieces. "Well," Luke said, "that's better than it was. Better than most of mine, actually." This last was said with a mournful look at the floor beneath his chair, which was littered with little shards of china and the remains of one entire plate which he had dropped in frustration after his seventh failure. He sighed, pointed his wand at the mess, and said "Reparo." The plate that he had dropped slid back together, and he picked it up and tried again. This time, when he rapped it on the table, a network of long cracks appeared on it just as though it was about to break normally, but it didn't actually fall apart. Luke set it down carefully.

"I just don't get it," Teddy said abruptly. 

Luke and Marissa both looked up and stared questioningly at him until he went on, "Violet, I mean. Missing our day in Diagon Alley and then acting like nothing happened. I asked her about it when we met up outside the Great Hall before breakfast, and do you know what she said?"

"You met up with her outside the Great Hall before breakfast?" Luke grinned. Ostensibly, he had no right to tease anyone about this sort of thing while he was sitting next to Marissa, but this was simply too good. "Were you just aching for some time alone with her? Dying to hear the dulcet tones of her voice? Did you long for the touch of her hand on yours throughout the summer, waiting for the all-too-brief moments spent in her company when you visited her house and the sweet, sweet dream of her presence became, for one sweet, precious moment--"

"Oh, shut up," Teddy said. "Everyone knows you and Marissa are practically dating by now."

"Are not," Luke and Marissa said at once.

Teddy snorted back a laugh at that and tried the charm on another plate. The plate turned invisible, but, judging from the sound it made when he dropped it in his startlement, not unbreakable. "Anyways," he said, "Do you know what she told me?"

"Was it 'Teddy, my darling, I've missed you so these long hours without you--'"

"Shut up and no. It was 'I accidentally lit the house on fire'. Just like that. Like she was reading off a shopping list. Flour, eggs, floo powder, unintentional arson, gnome repellent, cauldron cleaner. And the way she said it, she obviously meant the whole house, which is not something you ought to be that casual about, and not something that anybody but a really powerful wizard should be able to control by themselves. But Professor Shelly said that her husband--"

"Ex husband," Luke corrected.

"Ex husband, whatever," Teddy said. "She said that he controlled it."

"Come to think of it," Luke said, "Didn't Professor Shelly also imply that it was only the living room?" He pondered that for a moment. "Gosh," he said. "I hope that glass sculpture of Helga Hufflepuff survived. I rather like it, it's very dramatic."

"So did she accidentally set the house on fire twice in a row?" Teddy said. "Should we be worrying that Violet is going to burst into flames?"

"Just in case," Luke said, "You better not look at her too much for a while. The heat might set her off."

Still, Teddy's curiosity had set off Luke's curiosity, and Luke couldn't help thinking about it for the rest of class, and on the way to Herbology. 

Professor Longbottom met the Slytherins and the Hufflepuffs at the greenhouses and let out a cheery yell to get their attention. He was in the door of greenhouse four, and stripping off what appeared to be a vintage gas mask and dragonhide gloves as he headed towards greenhouse three. "This way, students," he called, and they all followed him into the greenhouse. Most of it was filled with vines that seemed to be trying their damnedest to choke out any and all light. A canopy had been fitted over them to help with that, and the greenhouse itself was even enlisted in the efforts, the glass panels darkened like sunglasses. "This," Professor Longbottom said as though an infestation of actively writhing dark green tentacles was something to be proud of rather than, for instance, to destroy with all possible haste, "is devil's snare. As you may have guessed from the name, it's a bit dangerous if you're not careful, so don't wander--stop it, you," he said, batting at a vine that had reached out to touch him. "Don't wander off by yourself, and if you are caught in it, yell for help immediately. For the most part, devil's snare is useless except to guard things or attack things, but for a little while out of every year, it produces seed pods that can be used to create a potion for setting broken bones, and which also," and he turned towards the plant, which was once again trying to creep up on him, and finished loudly with "make excellent kindling." The plant hesitated, and slowly withdrew its tendrils.

Mark was already rubbing his hands together in anticipation. He liked herbology, possibly because it was his best subject, or else the only subject he was really good in at all, depending on who you asked and how charitable they were feeling at the time.

Professor Longbottom taught them a spell to keep the plant at bay, and pretty soon they were working in groups of four to venture into the vines and find the seed pods. Luke, Mark, and Marissa got stuck with Hieronymus Runel, who was at least a decent enough spellcaster that he was able to keep the flame spell going brightly at the end of his wand, and that made up for Mark's somewhat sickly, oddly red flame. Still, they all kept a close eye on him, especially Mark, who had been on the wrong end of Runel's wand too many times to trust him. 

They finally found a cluster of seed pods and started harvesting, and the plant tried to keep them away, but it was thoroughly outmatched, and a quick burn here and there kept it from actually doing anything to them. They took turns harvesting among the muffled sounds of other students being less successful and having to be rescued by the teacher. They emerged with the seed pods in tow, and found that only one group had gotten out before them, and the other group hadn't gotten nearly as many pods, and looked rather distressed, as though they had had to escape from the plant, rather than walking out with their pod-bearer helpfully pointing out where the vines were trying to encroach.

The other groups that emerged from the plant were in a similar condition to the first one. One emerged without any pods, one was missing a member, and one had to be retrieved, in its entirety, by a somewhat miffed-looking Professor Longbottom, who wound up bringing them out one at a time with a stern warning to listen to what the teacher said or the venomous tentacula would quite literally eat you alive come fifth year.

Professor Longbottom counted out the pods, more as a formality than anything else, and declared that Mark Jonson's group had done the best. He rewarded them with chocolate frogs and the class was dismissed. 

The schedule this year called for Hufflepuffs and Slytherins to go on to History of Magic together, so Luke, Marissa, and Mark kept walking together, although Runel backed off. The walk to History class straight from the greenhouses was a serious trek. The only thing longer would have been if they'd had to go to Astronomy, which was only ever held at night, or Divination, which they weren't taking yet. They opened up their frogs on the way. Luke finite'ed his frog by the simple expedient of jamming his wand into the box without opening it wide enough for the frog to get out, then he pulled out the de-animated candy and handed it over to Mark, who grabbed it without thinking about the fact that he had an open box in his hand. His own frog promptly jumped out and bounded across the floor, and he let out a dismayed little groan. 

"Wingardium leviosa," Luke said, aiming his wand at Mark's wayward candy, and it floated up into the air. He guided it to the Hufflepuff's hand, then de-animated it for him.

"Thanks," Mark said. "You're the best, you know that?"

"Well, yeah," Luke said cheerfully, looking into the box at the card. "Ooh, a Sirius Black. Weren't you looking for one of those, Mark?"

Mark nodded. "Yeah. You want my Medea?"

"Can I get the Alastor Moody for it instead?" Luke said. "I'm collecting the Order of the Phoenix."

Mark nodded. "Yeah," he said. "I think I can part with my Mad-Eye for a Sirius Black."

"You boys are such dorks," Marissa said. "I've got... um... Merlin. Who wants him?"

"Someone who's never had a chocolate frog before," Mark said. "He's really common." And Mark reached into his own box and pulled out a Merlin card. 

Marissa shrugged, and handed the card to Luke. Luke handed his Sirius Black to Mark, and Mark reached into his bag and pulled out a little box full of chocolate frog cards, rifled through it, and extracted a card with a picture of grizzled old wizard with one bulging, mismatched eye watching the viewer like a hawk. He handed it over to Luke, and Luke grinned and put the Mad-Eye Moody card into his chocolate frog box. 

\-----------------------------

"So Violet," Luke said. "What did happen, with the accidental magic, I mean?"

Violet looked up at Luke, and then immediately back down at her plate. She stabbed sullenly at a bit of fish and said, "I suppose Teddy's told you he was badgering me, then? I swear, he ought to be a Hufflepuff, the way he badgers."

"Naw," Luke said. "Hufflepuffs can be weird, but not as weird as Teddy. Teddy is Ravenclaw weird. That's like an extra, super-weird weird."

"Oh, thanks," Teddy put in from over his own plate. "You say the sweetest things, you really do."

Luke stuck his tongue out at Teddy and turned back to Violet. "It's not like I'm looking for gossip, you know I wouldn't do that. I'm just worried, because Teddy seems to think that you accidentally set your whole house on fire, and that's pretty dangerous if it's true. I mean, that's big magic. You must have been really angry or something. Did your dad do something wrong?"

"No," Violet said flatly, and she refused to make any more reply to that line of questioning, even when Luke offered her his dessert. Luke, out of options for the moment, relented, though he made sure that Violet knew that he was there to talk if she needed. She only nodded and said that she knew that perfectly well, then she got up and left the lunch table.

"Well," Teddy said. "There's certainly a bee up her twisted knickers."

Luke stared at him for a moment, shook his head, and elected to say nothing to that. Teddy was weird. This was established fact, and there was no use arguing with the weirdness.

\--------------------------

After curfew, Luke and Marissa sat in the Slytherin common room, speculating about what might have happened with Violet, and, more importantly, with her father.

"I hear Andrew Leiman was always a colossal pain," Marissa said. "I mean, it's obvious he's not exactly a model father. He only comes to the country about once a year, he's usually off bouncing around somewhere in Asia or something, and sometimes, I get the impression that he has other children than Violet, by other witches. Even his own father doesn't seem to like him as much as he likes Professor Shelly. I bet he was doing something stupid, like trying to get her to lose control on purpose."

Luke shook his head. "That would explain how the fire started," he said, "but not how one person was able to control it. Fire is dangerous, Marissa, just ask Professor Gills, or Professor Leiman. They'll both tell you that fire magic is some of the most dangerous magic there is, because fire is hot, and it's high energy, and it's almost alive in a lot of very important ways, and any wizard who can stop a real, blazing, whole-house fire has got to be a powerful wizard. Like, really powerful. People said that Albus Dumbledore was nuts for using fire in duels. Albus Dumbledore, Marissa!"

"Well, then, maybe Violet's dad is really just a very powerful wizard. They're supposed to be really hard to get along with, sometimes. Merlin had basically one friend in his whole life, and Alastair Crowley's life was just a long string of failed relationships before he went nuts in that duel with Mackar the Unforgivable, who was, by the way, also totally unlikeable. Even Dumbledore himself never married."

"Dumbledore didn't exactly go in for women," Luke said evenly. "I mean, none of the biographies ever come out and actually say it, but it's pretty clear when you take them all together that he wasn't really enthusiastic about the fairer sex. Actually, that one by Rita Skeeter seems to imply that he sort of had a thing for Grindelwald, which is a bit weird to think about. Of course, after it establishes that Dumbledore wasn't big on women, that particular biography goes on to imply that he fancied pretty much everyone from Winston Churchill to Harry Potter."

"That's not the point," Marissa said. "The point is that if Violet's dad is a really powerful wizard, especially if he's always off heroing somewhere, he'd almost have to be hard to get along with, and he'd be able to put out a house fire without a problem."

"Maybe," Luke said, "But how would we find that out? 'Oh, hello, Violet, how are you doing today, has your dad defeated any dark wizards or taken over any small countries lately?'"

Marissa rolled her eyes. "Well, no, obviously you wouldn't say something like that, that would be stupid. You'd have to just come out and ask her."

Luke shrugged. "You go ahead and do that," he said. "I'll stay friends with Violet. She's obviously not very happy about the idea of talking about it. If she wants to say something, it'll come out when she's good and ready, and that's her right. We really shouldn't go and badger her."

Marissa stared at him for a moment. "I suppose you're right," she said, "but you know Teddy is going to keep worrying about it, and Mark probably will too, and you'll be wondering, because you're the curious sort, and I'll be wondering, because I happen to like Violet, too, she's my best friend." there was a brief pause as she considered what she'd just said. "Well, my best friend apart from you."

"Nonsense," Luke said. "We're the League. We're all best friends with each other. Now, I'm going to bed. Goodnight, Marissa." And with that, he got up and went through the second door on the right, down the short hallway, and into the dormitory, which contained four large four-poster beds and one bed under a tent, which was heavily enchanted and belonged to Hieronymus Runel. Wealth hath its privileges

\-----------------------

Over the next two weeks, Marissa always seemed to be on the verge of asking Violet directly about her father, but something seemed to stop her every time. On the way to quidditch tryouts, Luke finally broke down and asked her, "What keeps you from saying something? It can't be common sense or your own politeness, you haven't got those, really."

"Oh, shut up," Marissa suggested. "And what's been stopping me is... well, it's my own dad. I have no idea who he is, what he did for a living, if he's dead or alive, if he's a good person, if he even knows that I exist. I don't really like to talk about him, though, because it's sort of a... a painful subject. And if Violet feels the same way about her father, even though she knows who he is and stuff like that, well, then, I don't want to make her talk about it. It just wouldn't be nice." She glanced up at the quidditch pitch. "Hm," she said. "It looks like everyone's heard that you're trying out," she said.

"And why shouldn't I?" Luke said. "It's a recklessly dangerous sport that no sane schoolmaster ought to let his students so much as read about, for fear they'd try it. How does that not just scream 'play me' to boys age ten to fourteen?"

"And above," Marissa said cheerfully. "Don't forget that older boys are stupid, too."

"Oh, come on, Marissa. You'd give your left... um... leg to be a professional quidditch player."

"Well of course I would," she replied, as though she hadn't just implied that all quidditch players were stupid. "They make tons of money and all they have to do is play a little game once in a while."

Luke shrugged. "I don't know if it's really a career," he said. "I mean, you're just... getting paid to play a game. Where's the work in that?"

Marissa never got a chance to answer, though, because at that moment, they stepped onto the pitch itself, and Phineas Chenner came running up to Luke, all smiles and cheer. "Luke," he said. "So glad you decided to show up! Are you ready to play some quidditch?"

"Only if I make it through tryouts," Luke said. "And if I think you're just trying to suck up to me, I'm not going to play. I’m serious, Chenner."

The sixth-year boy grinned lopsidedly and handed Luke a broom. "I'm not sucking up to you. You'll have to work hard to get through tryouts."

Luke nodded. "Good," he said. "Now somebody hand me a quaffle. I want to get used to holding it."

The next hour or so was practice time, for everybody to get into shape. Big, dangerous iron bludgers roamed around the pitch, chased by no less than five potential beaters, three worn quaffles, more brown than a proper dark red, were tossed around between six chasers, pretty much anyone under two hundred pounds and therefore light enough to be "nimble" seemed to be going for the seeker position, and there was a keeper to every ring on the pitch. Because of the sheer number of aspiring seekers, the air was thick, or relatively thick, at any rate, with the tiny golden snitches. Luke actually ran into one while he was working with the quaffle. He was, he discovered, not the best player on the field, but he was far from the worst. Three of the other potential chasers, and one of the possible beaters, and most of the keepers, and the hilariously vast majority of the seekers, were prone to stupid mistakes. There were a number of midair collisions, which Luke couldn't help but think was incredibly stupid when you had (if his calculations were right) almost fifty million cubic feet to work with, and more if you didn't care about leaving the boundaries of the pitch in order to avoid such trifling things as the risk of a hundred and fifty foot fall. Still, when the tryouts themselves started, Luke found himself nervous and convinced that he was about to fail badly.

Jeremy Roan went first in the chaser trials, and he made nine of ten goals, which was unsurprising, since he had been on the team for three years. After him was the other incumbent, Cassandra Casstage, who made a perfect run, and then it was Luke's turn. Phineas handed him a quaffle and patted him on the back hard enough that, if Luke had been airborne at the time, he might have been in serious danger of falling off of his broom. "You'll do fine," the quidditch captain said, and then, Luke was off. 

The quaffle nearly slipped out of his sweat-soaked hands on the way to the goalposts, and then, he was choosing his target. Advice from various books on the subject passed through his mind, much of it contradictory. He was sure that he could make an excellent keeper if he knew which of the umpteen million books on being a chaser his opponents had read, but that was neither here nor there. He had read seven of them, and was therefore no better prepared than if he had read none. Finally, he simply picked a goalpost and went for it, blasting towards the leftmost of the three rings, and veering right at the last second, not much, just enough to make the keeper start for the middle ring, and Luke tossed the ball at the left ring anyways, and that was a goal made. 

One down, Luke thought, nine to go.

After that, it was easier. He had proved to himself that he could do it, and although he only got five quaffles through, that was one more than the next runner up. The final lineup of the Slytherin quidditch team would have Luke as a chaser. 

"I think you did well," Mark said as they walked away from the tryouts together. Marissa and Mark had been there to watch, and Teddy had stopped by to peek in, but had left before Luke saw him.

"I barely made it," Luke said. "You know, the quidditch team should have better players than me, but there's so few people in Slytherin that we can't get a full crop of good players. At least our keeper is good enough. And the beaters.

"Our keeper is rubbish," Marissa said. "But she's the best we could find. We're still doomed when the actual games start, unless Chenner pulls off some sort of a miracle, which I doubt is going to happen. But at least you can help us to be doomed, right Luke?"

Luke chuckled. "Yeah. Right, thanks for that, Marissa."

By the end of the next day, all the teams' tryouts were done. Teddy had tried out for the Ravenclaw team as a beater, and just barely not made the cut, but Violet was nearly insufferable at dinner when she announced that she would be playing beater for Gryffindor, as the only new person on the team this year. She had actually beaten out a number of older students, and she was really, really pleased to be on the team, because it meant that she was going to be getting praise and respect for hitting heavy things towards people with a bat, and she didn't get much further than that before she started giggling in a really unsettling way. Luke had the feeling that he would have a lot of bruises by the end of the year. It simply hadn't occurred to him that the people who would try out for beater were probably just a little bit more eager to inflict harm than your average schoolchild, which was to say that they were most likely psychopaths without a hint of remorse. Or Violet, he thought after a few moments to consider whether she counted as a remorseless psychopath or merely someone who it would probably have been wiser not to give a bat and a bludger to and tell to have fun.

"I think it's going to be fun," Violet said as they headed to the year's first meeting of Dueling Club that night. "The two of us, competing like friendly rivals on the quidditch field..."

"You inflicting grievous bodily harm, Luke writhing in agony in the infirmary," said Marissa, who had been convinced to come and watch.

"Permanent spinal injuries, brain damage, insane, evil cackling as Violet's inner Morgan la Fey is finally allowed to run rampant," Teddy said cheerily.

"You're not helping, either of you," Luke and Violet chorused together.

"I haven't just got Violet to worry about," Luke went on. "There's five other flying sociopaths with great big wooden truncheons that I've got to watch out for."

They stepped into the Great Hall, all of them automatically looking up at the ceiling as they walked in. It was just a habit that you got into when you spent more than about a week at Hogwarts. Walk into a large room, automatically look up to check the weather. It didn't work anywhere but the Great Hall, and that one abandoned classroom on the third floor where the rain would actually reach far enough down to soak the taller students, but that didn't stop anyone from forming the habit. It was overcast tonight.

Once again, most of the first year had turned out for the first meeting. Luke recognized Lennox Finch-Fletchley and moved to hide behind Teddy, but Teddy's hair was bright blue today, so it was sort of a useless gesture. The first-year Slytherin ran over to him and shouted, "Hey, Luke! How are you?"

"I'm just fine," Luke said. "You know you're not allowed to duel me, right?"

"Why would I want to?" Lennox asked in truly puzzled tones. "You're way more powerful than I could ever be."

Luke closed his eyes and counted to ten. He was about to reply when Teddy answered for him.

"Wasn't your dad a Hufflepuff in the DA? Why are you acting like you think it's just the best thing ever that Luke's got a bit of Voldemort's soul in him?"

Lennox gave Teddy a look like he was crazy. "Because Voldemort was the most powerful wizard of the last three centuries. My dad was really lucky Potter had a big bad prophecy on his side, because if it wasn't for that, he'd have chosen the wrong side. I'm not going to make that mistake. Whatever Luke ends up doing, I want to be on his side, because that's where the power is."

Luke pinched the bridge of his nose. "That's not... That's just... I don't even have words for... for..."

"For how incredibly slimy and Slytherin that is," Marissa said. "I mean... don't you even care that Voldemort killed people, that he was a murderer, that his Death Eaters tortured people and got away with arson and terrorism and even _rape,_ and all on his command?"

Lennox shrugged. "Maybe they did do all that stuff, but they could do it, because they were winning right up until Harry Potter showed up with the unstoppable force of a prophecy behind him. Mum says that's the only reason he won, is because there was this big, important prophecy about him."

"Your mum," Teddy said, "Is probably the worst source for information about that subject in the entire world."

"My mum knows a lot more about the war than you do, Lupin." Lennox's face had twisted up into a look of almost-hatred, and Luke's hand dropped down to his wand. "She says your dad died because he was the worst duelist in the Order of the Phoenix, and your mum was just a freak, just like you!"

Teddy pulled out his wand, brought it up, and Luke's own wand snapped up and he shouted, "Asi!" A gust of warm wind pushed Teddy over away from Luke.

"What was that for!" Teddy yelled. 

"You're not going to go around jinxing first years, Teddy," Luke said. Then he turned and directed an angry glower at Lennox. "No matter how wrongheaded and unpleasant those first years are."

Lennox thought over the implications of that for a few moments, and then turned and headed back to his friends. 

"Aw, come on," Teddy said as he got to his feet. "Just one little jinx? A bat-bogey hex? Inflictus?"

"No," Luke said. "Anything you do to him, I'll do to you. Calm down, and you'll figure out that it's not worth it to go beating the snot out of him. No matter how much snot he's got in the first place."

Teddy's hair shifted color, going from bright blue to an angry-looking red, but he said nothing more, so Luke decided that he must have agreed, if only reluctantly. Luke turned his attention back up to the front of the Great Hall just in time to see Professor Shelly striding up to a large stage that had been conjured, with Professor Leiman in a pinstriped suit behind her. She reached the edge of the stage and raised up her wand, and there was a crack of thunder followed by perfect silence. 

"Good," Professor Shelly said. "Welcome back. Or, if you've never been to a meeting of the Dueling Club before, welcome. I'm Professor Shelly. You may know me from such classes as Defense against the Dark Arts and Extracurricular spelldancing lessons. Since we have new students here today, and it's our first meeting of the year, and not a one of you is actually old enough to be trusted to retain any actual information, we'll start with a demonstration duel today, and then you'll all have some duels of your own. James, if you would please step up?"

She gestured to her father in law and he stepped up to the stage. Luke had seen him duel a few times, and it was always remarkable, from start to finish. The instant his feet hit the stage, his limp very nearly vanished, as though it was mostly feigned for the benefit of anyone who might want to attack him, although wanting to attack Professor Leiman was probably, in Luke's opinion, a pretty good sign that you were a crazy person. 

"This is a demonstration duel, so we'll be speaking our spells aloud, but just because we use a spell doesn't mean you're allowed to use it. Some of the spells we'll be using are dangerous." Professor Shelly looked out over the crowd to make sure that her point had hit home, and then she nodded. "Right. We begin by bowing to each other." She bowed to Professor Leiman, who bowed right back. 

Leiman brought his cane up and brandished it at Professor Shelly, snapping "Aguamenti!" A thunderously fast jet of water erupted from the end of his cane and blasted into Professor Shelly's chest, and she was nearly knocked clear off the stage, winding up flat on her back just inches from an out-of-bounds disqualification.

She rolled to one side and brought up her wand with a loud cry of "Impedimenta!"

Professor Leiman pivoted on his left foot through a full three hundred and sixty degrees to avoid the invisible jinx, which gave Professor Shelly long enough to leap to her feet in a fluid motion that brought her wand up and pointed at Professor Leiman. They stood there for a moment, wand and cane leveled at each other, and then he pointed his cane down at the stage and snapped, in rapid succession, "Reducto, wingardium leviosa, depulso!" A few pieces exploded off of the stage and Professor Shelly barely had time to throw up a shield charm before they were hovered into the air and thrown at her with enough force for a knockout blow. Three shards of the stage bounced off of her shield, a few more zipped past her and skidded across the floor until they collided with the far wall.

Professor Shelly rushed forwards through her shield and shouted "Wosi!" at Professor Leiman, and a rush of cold air from behind him whipped at his clothes. 

Had he tried to remain standing, the spell would have knocked him off his feet, but he crouched down and extended his left leg out in front of him as a brace, bringing his cane up and shouting "Stupefy!" A bolt of red light burst from the end of his cane and Professor Shelly dodged to the side to avoid it, her wind spell fading as she lost concentration. Professor Leiman clearly had the advantage now, and he pressed it, pointing his cane at one of the pieces of the stage that Professor Shelly had stepped past in her approach, and snapping "Accio! Depulso!"

The fragment of wood, a section about a foot square with singed-looking edges, flew through the air at the defense professor and she brought up her wand and snapped "Incendio!" 

The fragment of the stage burst into flames and burned up in front of her, just as Professor Leiman cried, "Stupefy!" and the stunner blasted through the last remaining wisps of the flame and hit Professor Shelly in the face.

She slumped over and Professor Leiman got back to his feet from his crouching position. "Hm," he said. "She's been practicing." He walked over to Professor Shelly and pointed his cane lazily in her general direction. Her eyes came open and she let out a little groan. 

"I lost," she said, very matter-of-factly. She got to her feet and looked around. "Right," she said. "So that's how a duel is supposed to look. Everyone, please turn your attention to the marked areas on the mats on the floor." As she said this, she waved her wand, and a few dozen mats appeared on the floor, with rectangles marked on them in white.

The students were organized by years and Luke grabbed Marissa's hand. "Come on," he said. "It'll be fun. Who knows, you might win." Marissa stared at him for a moment. Violet and Teddy were already paired off and exchanging friendly taunts. "I don't want to have to go against Runel or Kinsey or Little. They're way too good."

Marissa sighed. "I'm going to regret this," she said. "I'm going to regret it, and I'm going to wake up with my face stuck flat on the ground, and everyone is going to laugh at me." She pulled out her wand. "So you had better be right that it's fun."

Luke gave her his winningest smile and they found a carefully marked off dueling space, about ten feet away from Teddy and Violet, and squared off to wait.

"All right," Professor Shelly said. "Are you ready?" Various nods and noises of assent echoed around the Great Hall and she nodded. "Right then. Three, two, one, bow to your partners, and... begin!"

Luke's wand came up and he cried, "Expelliarmus," just as Marissa shouted a shield charm. The spell didn't even make her flinch, and she immediately fired back with a stunning hex, which Luke tried to deflect, but was surprised to discover was too strong for his rebondi to throw directly back at her. Instead, it went haring off towards the ceiling.

He didn't have very long to recover from the surprise of how powerful Marissa's stunner was, as she had already taken a step back and was bringing her wand up in the familiar underhand motion of a tripping jinx. Luke pointed his wand at the floor in front of her feet and snapped "Riddikulus!" A shower of rubber ducks blasted out of the floor and went everywhere, pelting Marissa and breaking her concentration, just long enough for Luke to cast a refrectus shield. 

Marissa stared at him for a moment. "Isn't that the boggart-banishing spell?"

Luke nodded. "Yeah, but Professor Leiman told me about a time that he used it to distract someone stupefy."

He raised his wand with the last word, and Marissa barely had time to bring up her own wand and yell "Rebondi!"

The stunner bounced off of her shield and hit Luke's, coming apart and spraying him with intense red light that made him flinch, which turned out to be a mistake, because Marissa yelled "Expelliarmus," next, and even though it came through the shield weakened, Luke's grip on his wand wasn't tight enough and it flew out of his hand and clattered across the floor behind him.

"All right, Marissa!" he cried, and she stood there, beaming.

"I won!" she said, something between incredulity and triumph in her voice. "You were right, that is tons of fun!" Her rebondi shield went down and she ran over to Luke and hugged him enthusiastically. "Thanks for making me do that, it was a blast. You should probably go grab your wand."

Luke ran off to grab his wand, and he and Marissa started again. As it turned out, they were pretty evenly matched, although Luke won more than he lost. 

"I must not get my dueling skills from my mother," Marissa said. "She's hopeless in a fight, she always tells me that, that's why she never fought in the war."

Luke shrugged and wiped a bit of sweat from his brow. Marissa had made him really strain for his last victory, and he was aching all over, but he'd had enough fun that he didn't really mind. "I guess your dad gave you something after all."

Marissa shook her head. "My dad never gave me anything," she said. "I know that much. If I got my dueling skills from him, they're stolen."

Luke sighed. This sort of invective wasn't unfamiliar. Marissa was bitter about her father, and all the recent talk about Violet's dad was bringing it out pretty badly. "Well, don't think about your dad, then," Luke said. "Think about something happy, instead."

Marissa smiled at that and took his hand. "All right," she said, and they walked back to the Slytherin common room hand in hand.

\----------------------

"So," Mark said. "I heard you and Marissa were getting very cozy the other day."

Luke looked up. He and Mark were studying together for an Astronomy essay. Mark was fairly decent with the subject, but Luke was awful. Of course, they hadn't even made mention of Marissa for nearly two hours, or, for that matter, spoken in the last ten minutes. Luke took a moment to realign his thoughts to what Mark was thinking, a difficult task under any circumstances. 

"I suppose that's one way to put it," he said. "I mean, we were... hanging out at the Dueling Club, and... and we walked back to the Slytherin Common room together."

"Holding hands, the way I hear it," Mark said. "That sort of thing doesn't exactly help with people thinking she's your girlfriend."

Luke pushed down the urge to let his head slam onto the library work table. Really, the only thing that stopped him was that a loud thud like that would have attracted the attention and therefore the ire of Madam Pince, whose attitude towards noises in her library consisted mainly of the word "no".

"If people want to think that Marissa's my girlfriend," Luke said, "They can go right ahead. It's not as though they're all that far off. I mean, she is a girl, and she is my friend." He took a deep breath. "And she has kissed me before," he added in a whisper.

Mark's eyes bulged out a little bit. "Really?" he said.

"Quiet down over there," Madam Pince called in a remarkably loud hiss.

Mark looked back and forth and said again, in a raspy whisper, "Really? What was it like?"

Luke shrugged. "It was all right. I mean, I haven't really got much to compare it to, you know, so it would be pointless to go rating Marissa's smooching skills without any... sort of a... a baseline reference. I haven't got any way of saying if it was a good kiss, or if it wasn't."

Mark shook his head. "It was still a kiss," he said. "You're lucky. Marissa's pretty, but someone like me could never get someone like her to even give me the time of day."

"He said about one of his four best friends," Luke added. "Do you really... you know... like Marissa?"

"Well of course I like Marissa," Mark said. "She's my... oh, you mean like like."

Luke closed his eyes and reminded himself that Mark was quite possibly the smartest of his friends, but he was also unrelentingly weird, and bad at social... anything, really. "Yes," Luke said. "I mean like like. Romantically like. Like you'd like to snog her and call her sweetie like. Like pining after her day after day like."

"Like Teddy likes Violet?" Mark said. He plowed on through the ensuing giggling fit from Luke and said, "I don't know if I like Marissa like that. I mean, sometimes I think maybe I might, but I'm twelve. I still think I might have a chance at being the first wizard in space sometimes. Or, well, the first squib. But other boys my age are talking about this sort of thing all the time. I caught two first years arguing over who was and wasn't hot in the seventh year the other day."

"Lucy Dymon," Luke interjected.

"But," Mark said, "it seems to me like they were just talking about who did and didn't have... you know... um..." he leaned in very close and hissed, as though it was a bad word and he could get expelled for so much as knowing it, "breasts."

It occurred to Luke that Mark was far too concerned with his own development if he'd thought this over as thoroughly as it sounded like he had, but then, Mark, as Luke constantly reminded himself, was different. "You can't deny that those are important," Luke said. "I mean, Marissa's still pretty... you know... flat. But I can't be the only one who's been noticing that Violet's getting... un... flat." This conversation was getting awkward.

"Really?" Mark said. "You know, I hadn't noticed."

"That's because you're too Mark Jonson to pay attention to trivial things like the physical universe," Luke said.

Mark blushed and looked back down at his paper. He didn't say anything else for about five minutes, and just when Luke was turning back to his own essay, Mark spoke up again. "Do you really think that's it? That I just have my head in the clouds too much to notice things like that?"

"Let me put it this way, Mark," Luke replied. "If I heard you saying that a girl had really nice melons, I would assume she was selling fruit, and that it was very tasty fruit."

The little Hufflepuff looked back down at the table. "Oh," he said. "Well, I guess so. I mean, that... isn't the sort of thing I would say, is it?"

Luke shook his head. "It's really not. But it's not like it's a bad thing. It just means you're respectful."

Mark shrugged, and this time, he actually went back to working on his essay.

\----------------------

Luke's first quidditch practice was that night, and he found himself a bit intimidated by the other players. He was the youngest by a wide margin, and being surrounded by fifth, sixth, and seventh years, especially Slytherins with reputations like theirs, was flatly unnerving. Eloise Parker kept looking at him like she was plotting his downfall, which, for all he knew, might have been exactly what she was doing.

"All right," Phineas said with a big, lopsided smile as they got out onto the pitch. "We're going to have to train up Luke here so that he's at our level, so get him the quaffle."

Jeremy handed over the quaffle and Luke mounted up his broom and rose into the air with the rest of the team, except for Phineas, who released the bludgers and snitch and then mounted up his broom, grabbed his beater's bat, and rose up next to Luke. "Later," he said, "We'll work on the starts of games. You'll have to catch the quaffle from Madam Hooch when she tosses it up at the start. But for now, you need to work on keeping your hold on it under stress. We're going to toss a few bludgers your way. Try to dodge, but if you can't you'll be fine. You're a wizard, wizards are tough." As he spoke, one of the bludgers rushed him, and he casually batted it away, the force of the strike sending his broom slightly off course. "Are you ready?" He said.

 _No_ , Luke thought.

"Yes," Luke said.

Chenner nodded and both beaters rushed away from Luke. "Get that quaffle through the ring," Phineas said, and then there was a loud crack of wood on iron and Luke turned and saw Eloise grinning, but not for very long, because pretty soon the bludger she had just sent his way blotted out a good chunk of his field of vision, and he rolled on the broom and started towards the goals, but in a sort of panicky, terrified way. Barely audible over the whoosh of the bludger's passage was the second crack from over to his right, and he turned and saw the other bludger barreling towards him. He braked, hard, and the bludger whipped past so close that he felt it scrape across the front of his broom, and Luke poured on more speed again, and then there was a sharp crack from behind him, and he dropped altitude just in time to dodge the bludger, which went sailing over his head so close he was surprised that he still had a skull, and it was about then that he realized that he was holding the broom with both hands, which meant that there was no quaffle in his hands. He hadn't even been aware of dropping it, possibly because of the outsized flying cannonballs trying to murder him, which were very distracting. He felt a blush creeping up his neck and then Cassandra flew up to him with the quaffle in her hand. She was looking at Phineas in a way that very clearly said "This little brat had better be worth it," but she didn't say anything as she handed over the quaffle. 

Luke took a deep breath and reminded himself to not drop the ball this time. He started up again, and immediately there were two sharp cracks, and he rolled to the side and dodged one bludger, by the simple expedient of veering into the other one. He was aware of a hard pain in his right side and a rushing sensation as he fell off the broom, still with a deathgrip on the quaffle, and he laughed as he thought the word "deathgrip," because, he reflected, he was probably about to die horribly. There was a sudden, nauseating slowing as he tumbled through the air, and then a sharp pain in the back of his head and then blackness.

\----------------------

"Luke?"

Luke opened his eyes, found himself staring at a bright light, and said a bad word.

"He's awake!" Mark cried from somewhere uncomfortably close to Luke's ear.

Luke took a moment to consider his condition. His left leg felt like it was probably broken, but heavily numbed, his ribcage felt like it was on fire, he had a raging headache, and he was fairly sure that he'd been hit with a stunner. Only one of these things surprised him.

"Why have I been stupefied?" Luke said.

"Ah," Phineas's voice said. "That was me. And it wasn't stupefy, it was just a sleep charm to keep you from waking up and feeling a broken leg. I wanted to spare you the pain. Being nice, you know."

"Too late," Luke muttered. "But thanks for the thought."

"You kept hold of the quaffle all the way to the ground," Phineas said. "I'm impressed. Of course, Cassandra completely missed her chance to catch you, so she'll be getting a talking-to, but you're all right."

"Have I got a concussion?" Luke said.

"Madam Pomfrey says probably yes, but you'll be right as rain in a little bit. Here, drink this." A glass beaker was pressed into Luke's hand, and he gripped it and propped himself up, still keeping his eyes squeezed shut. It hurt to look at the light. He pressed the beaker to his his lips and took a swallow. A thick, gloopy potion that tasted vaguely of bubble gum slid into his mouth and he shrugged and drank it all down. His headache started to clear up a little bit, and he peeled one eye open and looked around. He was in the infirmary (although he had sort of guessed that already). Madam Pomfrey was over at the other side of the room, measuring out some sort of potion into a spoon. It smoked as she poured. 

She walked over to Luke. "Open up," she said, holding the smoking potion out to him.

Luke thought for a moment, plugged his nose, and opened up. This stuff looked like it was probably pretty foul. Madam Pomfrey pushed the spoon into his mouth and he nearly threw up. It tasted like feet. And not clean feet. It tasted like feet made of anger and despair, coated with the sweat of a forced march to their death. 

"Gach." Luke said calmly. "What was that?"

"Skele-Gro," Madam Pomfrey said. "You're only mending three breaks, so it should work in about an hour. Lie back, relax, and try not to think about it, that makes it hurt worse."

 _Hurt worse?_ Luke thought. _That doesn't sound encouraging._

And then it started hurting worse.

Luke let out a little yelp of shocked dismay as his leg and ribs began trying to crawl out of his body (or seemed to, if the sensation was anything to judge by). A hand shot out and gripped his own and he looked up the arm to its owner, fully expecting to see Marissa. Mark smiled back at him. "It's awful," he said, "isn't it? Don't worry, it'll be over in a little bit."

"Where's Marissa?" Luke asked, gritting his teeth.

"She's probably still yelling at Cassandra, mate," Phineas said. "Your girlfriend is really prote... uh..." The older boy trailed off as Luke shot him a look.

"She's not. My girlfriend." Luke squeezed Mark's hand, and Mark made a little noise of distress.

"Right," Phineas said. "Well, I'll go tell that girl who's definitely not your girlfriend, no sir, that her boyfriend is awake. You might want to let her know that you're not actually her boyfriend, though, because the way she's been acting since you fell, I'm not entirely convinced that she knows that."

Luke glared at him. "You shut up," he suggested.

"I'll chalk that up the Skele-Gro making you cranky, but I don't want any backtalk from you, Voldemort or not."

Luke puzzled for a moment over whether or not he could get away with a second irritable correction, decided that he couldn't, and watched Phineas leave. 

A few minutes later, Marissa came into the infirmary, and Mark dropped Luke's hand so that she could take it.

"How are you feeling?" Marissa asked.

"All right," Luke said. "I mean, aside from the fact that my ribs actually feel worse than they did after the car crash."

Marissa raised an eyebrow. "That bad? I knew Skele-Gro was awful, but it actually hurts worse than the break?"

Luke nodded. 

Marissa sighed and squeezed his hand. He squeezed back.

Over the next three hours, Marissa and Mark traded off tending to Luke. It was actually pretty sweet. Teddy and Violet stopped by to drop off a bag of every-flavor beans, which was probably sweet, but Luke had encountered a couple of bags that were completely without any edible flavors in just one year of knowing that there was such a thing as every-flavor beans. He couldn't help wondering how a product that was, at most, about one-quarter usable managed to survive in a free market. Unless there was someone, somewhere who actually liked the small-intestine-flavored beans.


	2. You're Very Bad at the Scientific Method

Violet was not happy about Luke's injury. She made this very publicly apparent, and was therefore on the verge of becoming annoying when the fire started. It was the beginning of October, and Luke was just getting down to breakfast when the second year Gryffindor girls came downstairs looking a terrible mess. There had clearly been some effort at smoothing down singed hair and quite a lot of thought had gone into charming burns away, but they were all, uniformly frazzled, frizzled, and just a bit charred. Except for Violet. Violet just wasn't there.

Mark made the connection first and jumped up to run over to the girls. Luke and Teddy were about five seconds behind him, and Marissa another two seconds behind them. They arrived in front of the Gryffindor girls with a barrage of questions. 

"What happened?" Luke asked.

"Where's Violet?" Teddy wanted to know.

"Why are you all burned?" Marissa said.

"Is Violet okay?" Mark cried.

"She's hurt, but not too bad," Daisy Lesewski said. "The fire started on her bed, but she woke up in time to start trying to fight it. It must have been a magical fire."

"Magical?" Luke said.

"Oh yeah," Daisy said. "You get those all the time in old buildings with a lot of really old magic in them. I'm surprised it doesn't happen at Hogwarts more often."

"Those do not happen," Justice Urguard said irritably. "They're an old wive's tale, invented after the muggles started using elephetricity and started having elephetrical fires."

"Ele-what?" Luke said.

"Elephetricity," Justice said. Her tone of voice brooked no argument. "You know, that stuff that they light their homes with instead of torches and candles and stuff."

"That's electricity," Luke said. "Where is Violet right now, Justice?"

"Professor Longbottom took her to the infirmary," Justice said. "We've all just come from there, because we were less hurt by it than she was, but Madam Pomfrey says Violet will be in there all day. Why do they call it electricicity, Restimen?"

Luke shook his head. "They don't. They call it electricity, because it's flowing electrons." He brushed past the singed-but-intact girls and headed to the infirmary with his friends in tow.

Violet was sitting on one of the beds with a book that had a number of X-Wing starfighters on the cover. "Hey guys," she said as they walked into the sunny infirmary. "How are you doing?"

"Better than you, apparently," Teddy blurted out.

"Teddy!" Marissa exclaimed. She sounded scandalized, but Luke couldn't help agreeing with her. Violet was plastered, quite liberally, with some orange substance that Luke couldn't quite identify. 

"I'm a fright right now, I know," Violet said. "Don't worry, it looks a lot worse than it is." She smiled at them. "And besides, I've been wanting a chance to catch up on my reading. I'm not even halfway through Rogue Squadron, and there's a whole other series I've got to read after that."

Luke shook his head. "What happened?" he said. "All we could get out of the other girls was that an urban legend got you."

"I did not get burned by the Goblin Village of the London Underground," Violet said. "A fire started in my bed. I was having a nightmare, and it got really out of control, and I couldn't quite douse it."

"And the other girls didn't help you?" Teddy said.

"Well, they sort of tried," Violet said, "but they didn't really get very far. I must have still been pretty freaked out, because the fire just kept coming back up again. Eventually, I had to have one of them stun me. That worked."

"Oh good, you got stunned instead dying horribly," Luke began, on his way to a really good rant about how the other Gryffindor girls must be a collection of idiots.

"So you're really okay?" Teddy said quietly.

"Yes Teddy," Violet said. "I'm fine. Just a little bit--oof."

She was cut off by Teddy running--it very nearly qualified as a sprint--to her bedside and throwing his arms around her, but mostly she was interrupted by the kiss.

"I was really scared for a minute there," Teddy said. He looked around, and his brain caught up with the fact that he had just planted a big, embarrassing smooch on Violet. 

She grinned, and Luke found himself thinking of a drawing of the Cheshire Cat he'd seen in the margin of an old copy of Alice in Wonderland once. "Didn't you once jinx Pam Patil for giving you chocolates?"

Teddy turned bright red and seemed to, or possibly actually did, lose a few inches of height. "Pam Patil isn't my best friend. And don't you go thinking that means anything. I would have done the same thing if it was Marissa."

"Aww, Teddy, I'm hurt," Mark said. "You wouldn't do it for me?"

Luke snrked back a laugh and Marissa punched Mark in the shoulder. Violet seemed about ready to collapse in a gale of laughter, but then she was closer to the (utterly exquisite) look on Teddy's face. 

"I don't think so, Mark," Teddy said. "Not unless you start growing a pair of really nice--"

"Mister Lupin!" Madam Pomfrey shouted as she bustled into the room. "Watch your language!"

\---------------------

After the fire, connections started being made in Luke's head. He could tell that the same thing was happening for Mark, just from talking to him, but it was a bit of a slow process. Still, within three days (during which Teddy studiously avoided coming within three feet of Violet), they found themselves in the library, researching the same topic: fire magic.

"I've got nothing," Luke said, looking up from Fire Cults of the 1600's. "Unless you think Violet's been possessed by the Flame Spirits of Lignous."

"I don't," Mark said. "But this is sort of interesting. It looks like there's a curse that can make you burst into flames occasionally It's called the Wreathing Flame"

"I read about that one yesterday," Luke said, turning the page. "I thought that must be it until I got to the end of that section and found out that it's an interval of only a few minutes between... burnings, I guess you'd call it. That couldn't be it."

He looked down at the page and started reading again. 

"Possession was often faked to ensure the downfall of a rival. The spores of a wisping mushroom, transferred to the body with a touch, would quickly spread over the whole body and establish a thin colony of invisibly small mushrooms, which would burst into flames once they were firmly established. Although bathing and washing the victim's clothes would generally eliminate the colony, the availability of water and soap for bathing was limited, and the unwashed victim would, indeed, burst into flames every night as the colony first began to wisp and immediately began to burn itself, leaving barely enough to recover and coat the unfortunate host again. Victims would be burned so often that they would be permanently disfigured, which made detection of a fake easy afterward. Because of how easily they were detected, such attacks were rare, and usually the prelude to death at the hands of the attacker, who wished to hide the evidence."

"Actually," Luke said, "She may be possessed by the Fire Spirits of Lignous after all. Take a look at this."

He passed the book over to Mark, who read a couple of times through, and then grinned as though Luke had given him a gift. "That is incredibly cool," Mark said. 

"Except for the part where people--like Violet, for instance--get badly disfigured, yeah, it is sort of a cool thing to know how to do."

"I think I might know where to find more information on that mushroom," Mark said. "Stay here, I've got to go find Professor Longbottom."

"How long will that take?" Luke asked.

"Probably about ten minutes," Mark replied. "Look through One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi for the wisp mushroom."

He dashed out of the library, and Madam Pince took off after him, yelling "There is no running in the library, young man!"

Luke thought that quite clearly Mark had just disproved that little theory, he had just shown quite conclusively that sometimes, there was running in the library, it just wasn't approved by the librarian. Luke refrained from pointing this out and pulled out his Herbology textbook. He paged to the back half for the fungi, and started flipping through.  
He had just reached it, a tiny blurb between White Moonshadow and Wistler's Wiltstalk, when Mark returned with a book, which he dropped onto the table. 

"I think it's in here somewhere," he said. "What does it say in there?"

"It says Wisp Mushrooms are native to Italy," Luke replied. "And that they're useful in a handful of potions, most of them love potions. Other than that, I can tell you only that they're brown. Has Violet looked brown to you lately?"

"It said invisibly small," Mark said, opening the book and looking through the table of contents. "I think that means it wouldn't change the color of her skin at all." He turned over a clump of pages, frowned, and turned more pages. He flipped back and forth, looking for the right page, and finally he found it, spread the book open, and read silently for a few minutes. "It could be a really tough colony, or it could be that Violet... you know... isn't bathing thoroughly enough. My money would be on a really tough colony."

Luke nodded. "That makes sense. And then, bathing would have to be enough to keep the colony from flaring that night, and it wouldn't be ready to flare again before it gets washed away. What we need to do is find out if Violet took a bath or a shower the day before the two attacks she's had."

Mark nodded. "I'll let you handle that. You can get away with asking a girl that sort of thing, but I can't."

Luke gave a stiff nod of his own. "I'll talk to her. Tell Professor Longbottom I said thanks. That book was really helpful."

Luke stood up and very nearly ran out of the library. At this hour, Violet was almost certainly in her mother's office, meeting for a chat. Of course, the hour in question was nearly over, and Luke had to dash through the halls at a truly irresponsible speed. Even doing that, he almost didn't make it, arriving only in time to meet Violet coming out of Professor Shelly's office.

"Violet," he said, "this is a really important question, so don't take it the wrong way, but when was the last time you showered?"

Violet gave Luke a long, searching look. 

"You want to know about my bathing habits," she said. "I'll just take a minute to let that sink in."

"Look," Luke said, "I know it's a weird, creepy thing to ask, but it's still important to know. We might be able to stop the fires if we can just figure out whether or not you've showered before them."

"The fires? Luke, the fires are just... a coincidence."

Luke shook his head. "'Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action,'" he quoted. "I don't believe in coincidence, though. Not coincidence like this. Did you shower before the fires?"

"I can't remember, Luke," Violet said. "Why does it even matter?"

"Because," Luke said, "Mark and I think that you may have a colony of wisp mushrooms growing on you. It fits all the symptoms. Occasional flare-ups, being burned by the fire, everything."

"You've been researching this without telling me?" Violet cried. "Why would you do that?"

"We were worried," Luke began, but Violet pushed him away. "No," she said. "I don't want to talk to you right now. I've got to decide if I still want to talk to you at all. You invaded my privacy, Luke. You’re lucky I don't jinx you until you stick to the walls."

Luke gaped at her. This wasn't the reaction he'd been expecting, but dammit, he really was worried, and now he had no way to monitor if she'd forgotten to shower when the next fire happened. He couldn't exactly go around asking the other Gryffindor girls to spy on Violet for him. Even if they would have agreed, which they most certainly wouldn't, it would only make things even worse when she inevitably found out. He thought for a moment, and decided to go to his only consistent source of truly good advice at Hogwarts.

\-----------------

Professor Leiman barely even looked up when Luke came in. He was flipping through what looked like a stack of photographs. 

"Have you come to guess where I spent the summer?" he said.

Luke shook his head. "Namibia," he said, "But no."

"Not Namibia. An excellent try, though. What are you here for, then, Mister Restimen?"

"I'm worried about Violet," Luke said. "And she won't let me help her."

"The fires, I presume?" Professor Leiman said.

Luke nodded. "Yes sir. The fires have really got me worried. I mean, she came through the last one all right, but what if the next one is worse?"

Professor Leiman smiled over his photographs at Luke. "Have I told you about my son?"

Luke shook his head. "No sir."

Professor Leiman nodded and set down his photographs. The one on top of the stack was of a scowling man with Latin American features, holding up a wand towards the camera. It wasn't a moving picture, which meant that some unfortunate muggle cameraman had gotten in the scowling man's way. "My son," Professor Leiman said, "is not like me. He is good humored, quick to laugh, uncomplicated, and a bit too good with women for his own good. It took me nearly a decade to get my wife to marry me, you know, and she divorced me as soon as Andrew was grown. We were separated before that, when I transferred Andrew to Hogwarts, and then things started to get bad, with Voldemort showing up and that sort of thing... well, he was out before then, but it was still a bit hair-raising. But do you know, Andrew had the same exact problem as Violet is having now when he was... oh, he must have been only about nine years old. Fires just kept starting up around him. He got burned a bit once or twice, but once it was obvious that it was him that was causing it, he started being able to make them stop by calming himself down. I suspect it's something that runs in the family. If I thought it was really, truly dangerous, I would take steps to prevent it, but I think that it's merely something Violet needs to control. It's accidental magic, after all. Embarrassing, a bit on the level of wetting the bed, but not much more dangerous than that. Offer her your compassion, but don't be too inquisitive. She's feeling embarrassed, and feeling very vulnerable, so don't be too... forward about helping her out."

"I think it's too late for that, sir," Luke said. "Mark and I were trying to help, and we found what we thought it must be, this mushroom called a wisp mushroom, that can cover up your whole body and burst into flames every night, and we figured that a really persistent colony must be living on her, and if she forgot to shower or something, that would let it flare, and that would explain it, and I told her that, and she got really mad at me, and now I don't know what to do."

"You might try apologizing," Professor Leiman said. "And offering her a sympathetic ear."

"I don't know if she'll listen," Luke said.

"If she doesn't, would you like for me to talk to her?" Professor Leiman asked.

Luke thought about it for a moment. "Yes," he said. "I would. But only if I ask you to, all right?"

"Of course," Professor Leiman said."

\-----------------------

"So that's what it is?" Mark said. "Just a really specific kind of accidental magic? I've never heard of that happening before, but then, there's tons of things I've never heard of. It's a good thing you thought of going to Professor Leiman." He looked down at his shoes, as though he was endlessly fascinated by them. "I never would have thought of that."

"Yes you would have," Luke said. They were sitting in a little common area somewhere on the fifth floor. It really couldn't be located any more specifically than that. Luke had drawn a map to it once and then tried following that, just out of curiosity. His map had not only seemed to indicate that the place he and Mark were sitting in was somewhere over the middle of the lake, it had led him rather mysteriously to the complete opposite side of Hogwarts, to a room full of broken mirrors and bright red mattresses. "You're smart," Luke said. "You would have thought of the obvious thing eventually."

"Oh, ha ha," Mark retorted, with all the gravity he would have given the declaration if it was the most brilliant comeback in the world. 

"You know I'm joking around," Luke said. "You're just a bit too... wrapped up in being smart sometimes. You don't notice the obvious things that are right in front of you. It's sort of sad sometimes, but it's not like I think it means you're stupid. You're just... distractable."

He glanced up at the clock on the wall. "It's about time. Are you ready?"

Mark nodded. It had been his idea to do it like this, instead of risking making a big scene. Of course, they might be barking up the wrong tree and about to embarrass themselves, but, well, that was the price you paid for trying to preserve your friendships sometimes. 

There was a long silence, and then footsteps coming down the hallway, And Violet came around the corner into the little wide spot in the hallway, with chairs and sofas and a few desks in it, and she tapped her foot on the floor, looking impatient. "This had better be good," she said. "I'm still really steamed at you two."

"We just wanted to say we're sorry," Mark said. "We won't even try to reseach it anymore. If you don't want us to go prying at you, we won't do it."

"I'm really sorry," Luke said. "I never should have invaded your privacy like that, trying to needle into it like it was my business. There's all sorts of excuses I could give you, but the truth is that I was just being nosy."

Violet looked between the two of them and sighed. "All right," she said. "I really ought to still be mad at you, but you're being so good about this that I can't. I'm not forgiving you, but I'll give you a chance to not be huge, enormous jerkfaces. All right?"

Luke and Mark nodded together and Violet nodded. "All right. "I'm still really mad, so I'm going to go back to the common room now, but... thanks for apologizing. It means a lot to me."

\--------------------------

By early November, things had gotten back to normal (or as normal as a school of witchcraft and wizardry can get). Violet's flare-ups of fire magic had, by all appearances, ceased, and although Luke was generally pretty bruised by quidditch practice, it had been two weeks since the last time he fell off his broom. Phineas had declared him to be ready for Saturday's game against Ravenclaw, and Luke was more than a bit terrified. Mark and Marissa both kept trying to calm him down, while Teddy systematically pushed his buttons. Frankly, Luke wished they would all just stop, as it was getting on his nerves and making him that much more tense.

That tension stayed with him as he headed out to the quidditch field with Mark's farewell ("You'll do just fine. I've seen you fly, and you're better than Teddy.") in his ears. He mounted up his broomstick and took off, and Madam Hooch released the balls, and tossed up the quaffle, and Luke rushed for it, going in aggressively like Phineas had taught him to, and the Ravenclaw chaser on the other side pulled back, not wanting to risk a collision, and Luke took possession of the quaffle, and headed off for the Ravenclaw goalpost.

A bludger zipped past him, but it was a few feet away, and Luke knew better than to be intimidated. He just kept right on going, straight to the goalpost while the Slytherin team gathered around him, forming a loose protective group. There was one familiar sharp cracking sound as a bludger was knocked away from the group, but for the most part, the only thing Luke heard was the rushing of the wind past his ears.

He drew up close to the goalpost and watched as the Ravenclaw keeper moved to block him, but the other boy hesitated just a moment too long in choosing a ring to defend. Luke made the goal, and the rout began.

The Ravenclaws got the quaffle for a moment, but a bludger to the broomstick nearly unseated the chaser who had it, and he dropped the ball, and then it was passed around the Slytherin team, hopping around to avoid recapture by the Ravenclaws, and somehow Luke wound up with it again, and again the Ravenclaw keeper screwed up. In fact, he screwed up over and over and over. Luke wasn't really expecting much out of the Ravenclaws; they had a reputation for being way too intellectual to be good at much besides reading, and although Luke was fully prepared to dismiss that idea (after all, he knew Teddy), the evidence seemed to be supporting it. The score was one hundred and fifty to thirty for Slytherin before the snitch was caught. After the snitch was caught, the score was quite simply comical. The word "decimate" came to mind, but Luke wasn't entirely sure if that was accurate. Whether it was or not, though, it had been a fairly absolute victory, and when Luke came out of the pitch afterward, Teddy was loudly swearing off the Ravenclaw quidditch team. 

"If they can't stand up to the Slytherins, they're not a real team," he said. "The Slytherins have the worst training, the least talented players, and bad coaching. It's ridiculous."

"Excuse me?" Luke said.

"Oh, don't give me that," Teddy said. "You never even played quidditch until this year. You thought it was just a big, dumb sport for big, dumb athletes." The way he said the word made it clear that being an athlete wasn't something to be proud of. His current disgust at the Ravenclaw quidditch team was probably a major factor in his newfound hatred of, or at least disdain for, athletes. He walked off in a huff.

Marissa, Mark, and Violet seemed to be more understanding. 

"That was incredible!" Mark said. "You slaughtered them!"

"I am no longer worried about facing the Ravenclaw team," Violet informed him calmly. 

Marissa just gave him a big bear hug and looked happy to be seen with him. 

Theoretically, there was a big party in the Slytherin common room, which all of the players would be attending. Luke intended to show up, he merely intended for his showing up to fall into the "eventually" category. The other Slytherins would think he was a bit weird for not showing up right away, but Luke really didn't care what any of them thought, since they were Slytherins, and at his heart, he was really more of a Hufflepuff sort of a person. The four of them wandered off to their accustomed spot in the castle, or their accustomed spot for Saturdays, anyways. It was, at first glance, a normal hallway with a painting of what appeared to be a pile of horse crap in it. When the words "an auror's nipples" were spoken near the painting (Luke would have paid quite a bit to hear the story of how that was discovered), however, it slid aside and revealed a small room furnished with tremendously ugly old clawfooted furniture, all of which had seen better days. Luke had the nagging feeling that the room was full of incredibly valuable antiques rather than just run of the mill old furniture, but there was no way of proving it beyond stealing the furniture, and it was all either beat up, vandalized, or both. Some of it managed to be beat up, vandalized, and both all at the same time.

Luke flopped down into his favorite chair, an old armchair with incredibly outdated swear words carved into the woodwork. He rested his hand on the word gadzooks, and his fingers began absently picking at a deeply ingrained bit of invective aimed at Pope Clement the Fourteenth. 

"That was hardly even a contest," Luke said after a few moments of quiet contemplation. "They basically just rolled over and played dead."

"Well, you were good out there," Mark said. "I mean, you flew like the pictures out of that book I got on how to play quidditch when my dad thought I was going to be a big sports star."

"So, textbook perfect and predictable?" Violet said. "The Ravenclaws blew like a three-dollar dinner date out there."

Luke started laughing at that. Violet's occasional forays into vulgarity were all the more entertaining for being so rare, and that one was a doozy. It didn't help that Mark had started laughing even though he clearly didn't quite get it. They let out their need to mock the Ravenclaws quickly, in one long burst, and they had no sooner finished than Teddy walked in. 

They all started giggling.

"Oh, hell," Teddy said. "Are you really still laughing over that? I told you, I'm giving up on quidditch this year. Ravenclaw's team is hopeless, and I don't want to sit around and watch them lose six games in a row. So why is Luke still here? Shouldn't he be off celebrating with the pureblood squad?"

"No," Luke said. "I prefer the League to the Slytherins. I mean, I actually like some of you."

"Some?" Marissa said.

"Mark can be a real..." he glanced down at the chair and read off, slowly, "Godless, memberlicking toff." He grinned. "I need to steal this chair so I can put it in my living room when I've got a house of my own."

Marissa rolled her eyes. "Boys," she said, letting out a small, expressively fed-up-sounding sigh. "I'm going to go and talk to the rest of the green and silver hot air dispensary. Curfew is coming up in about an hour, don't get caught out of your common rooms after hours."

They all said good night to her, and she stepped out of the painting, sliding it shut behind her.

"So," Teddy said, easing himself into the seat Marissa had been in, "how are we doing? Any new graffiti?"

This was a valid question. Although, as far as they all knew, they were the only ones who used the room, new graffiti, always in the same ages-old nomenclature, would pop up on the furniture from time to time. 

"I think mine says something new about spastic punks," Mark said.

"Naw," Teddy replied. "That one showed up last week. You know, I bet there's all sorts of things on the bottoms of these that we just never see."

Luke rolled his eyes. "As soon as you feel like crawling under a chair with a lit-up wand, Teddy, you go right ahead and do that. Us sane people will be here, laughing at you."

"I've done a lot stupider things than look for graffiti under a chair."

"Yeah," Violet said. "You routinely try to cast charms."

"And transfigurations," Luke put in.

"Oh, come on," Teddy said. "Nobody is good at transfigurations."

"Except for about half of your house, and the smart people in the other houses," Mark said.

"If it was just being smart," Teddy said, "You'd be good at it. Now, who wants to play chinese checkers?"

He reached into his pocket as he spoke and pulled out a folded board. Teddy was rarely without a board game, mostly because his friends had come to expect it of him.  
They played chinese checkers until it was down to just Luke and Mark. Violet had won rather handily, stretched, yawned, and gone off to bed. Mark was contemplating his next move, and had been for a couple of minutes.

"Oh, go ahead," Luke said. "You're going to lose anyways, just do it and get it over with. It's getting late."

Mark looked up and down between Luke and the board, then made his move. It was a move that bought him one extra turn, which he couldn't use for anything, and pretty soon, he had lost and the game was over. Teddy folded up his board--it didn't need pieces, the little spaces just lit up when you pressed your finger against them, and it knew who was who. A dozen different games like it were sold at Weasley's Wizard Wheezes, and Luke desperately wanted the Ludo version with the built in dice, but it was hellishly expensive and Luke couldn't really afford to go spending that kind of money on things like that.

"I'm off to bed too," Teddy said. "You two have fun reading the graffiti."

He stepped out and vanished behind the closing door, and after a moment, Mark said, "Well, there he goes. Good riddance to the... ah, there's a good one. Horsefaced jinx-eater."

"He could literally go horse-faced, too," Luke said.

"How horse-faced, do you suppose," Mark said. "I mean, could he turn his whole head into a horse's head?"

"No," Luke replied. "I asked him the same question once. Well, actually, it was if he could turn his arms into wings, but, you know... he said he can't turn too... animalish. So he's not a natural animagus with unlimited forms."

There was a brief silence, and then Mark spoke up again. "I really have no idea," he said.

Luke rested his elbow on the arm of his chair and his chin on the palm of that hand, and stared while he waited for Mark to catch up with the fact that he had said that out loud. When it seemed as though that wasn't going to happen, Luke said, "What do you have no idea about?"

"Who the prettiest girl in seventh year is," Mark replied. "I mean, I've spent a lot of time looking at them, and there's definitely a 'least pretty girl', but that doesn't really matter as much as the prettiest, does it?"

Luke took a moment to recover from the conversational whiplash he was experiencing. This wasn't the biggest non sequitor Mark had ever committed (it paled in comparison to the time he had suddenly exclaimed in the middle of lunch that Merlin couldn't have kept bees because they would have chased off his bowtruckles), but it was still a heinous non sequitor by normal human standards of conversational ettiquette. "Mark, this wouldn't have anything to do with a conversation we had several weeks ago that I had no way of being able to flag as important at the time, would it?"

Mark had the decency to flush a little at that. "It was a couple of months ago, yeah. We were talking about girls--"

"I'd have remembered that," Luke interrupted. "I mean, girls are not our usual fare. That came out wrong."

Mark giggled at that, but pressed on. "You may not remember it, but we were talking about girls. Well, actually, we were talking about how other people talk about girls, and I mentioned that a couple of first years had been talking about who was the best looking seventh year girl, and you had an answer ready and waiting to go, and I had... no idea. And I still don't. It seems a bit... weird. I started to wonder if maybe it was that I didn't like girls, so I tried looking at the boys instead, and... well, some of them are fairly handsome, but it's not as though I thought, oh, look at that, that's what I want. I think there's something wrong with my ability to see whether or not someone is good looking."

"Do you remember that time Teddy decided to go around bucktoothed and gawky 'in solidarity with the geeks of the world,'" Luke asked. Mark nodded, and Luke went on, "did you think that was at all attractive?"

"He looked like a constipated turtle," Mark said.

When Luke had finished laughing, he said, "If you don't think that was attractive, then you're fine."

Mark smiled back at him, but it was sort of a flimsy smile, like he had something on his mind. He stared off blankly at the wall for a second, frowned, and got up off of his chair. "Goodnight," he said, and he walked out of the room.

Luke grabbed his discarded quidditch robe and started to head out the door, but it opened back up before he was even halfway to it. Mark came back in. His face was bright red, and he looked as though perhaps he was about to either throw up or faint, and only indecision between the two was preventing him from doing either. 

"Actually," he said, "I think I'd like to test a theory."

He walked right up to Luke and, without any preamble or warning, kissed him (rather inexpertly) on the lips.

 _Oh,_ some abstracted, almost-unconscious part of Luke's brain thought. _So that's what that's like. Not too different from a girl, actually._

Luke's hands came up of their own accord and pushed Mark away.

"What the hell are you doing!?" he cried.

"Uh," Mark said. "I... uh..."

At that point he seemed to finally reach his decision. Fainting, luckily for Luke's shoes, won out.

Luke sighed and backed up to sit down on the swear-chair. He reflected, not without a bit of bitterness, that if he'd just gone ahead and admitted that Marissa was basically his girlfriend, rather than trying to keep his life simple by avoiding girlfriends and their associated complications altogether, one of his best friends would not currently be lying on the floor, making his life more complicated.

"I'm twelve," he mumbled irritably. "I shouldn't have to deal with this sort of crap."

He pulled out his wand, noticed in a sort of detached way that his hands were shaking, and revived Mark.

Mark sat up.

"Oh," he said. "Did I um... did I just..."

"Kiss me and then faint?" Luke said. "Yes, you did. You do realize that I'm trying to keep my life uncomplicated, and you've really just blown my uncomplicatedness streak to kingdom come, right? What inspired you to do that?"

"Um." Mark said. "It's late, I'm getting tired, we were alone, I trust you to at least not go telling anyone about it, and when you spend a couple of weeks trying to judge whether or not you think other guys are attractive, you sort of can't help but to start wondering about yourself." He looked down at the floor. "Goodness," he mumbled. "I'm trembling. That's not a good sign."

"Trembling how?" Luke said. 

Mark held up his hands, which were shaking visibly even from where Luke was sitting.

Luke grinned and held up his own shaking hands. They stared back and forth between each other's hands for a minute, and then Mark let out a giggle, and Luke let out a titter, and Mark chuckled, and Luke guffawed, and Mark started cackling like he did when he thought a joke was really, really funny, and suddenly they were both going full bore, laughing so hard they could barely breathe. The laughing fit alone carried them over the curfew line, and since it was late enough that they'd get in trouble if they were caught, and it wouldn't be any more trouble if they were caught out later, Luke just shrugged and patted the chair directly across from him. "Sit down," he said, in between little bursts of giggling. "We need to talk."

Mark took a seat, and for a minute, they let the giggling fade away, and then Luke opened his mouth to talk, and they both started laughing again, and that sort of thing kept happening for about ten minutes before Luke finally managed to say, "So what sort of a... um... result... did your experiment get you?"

Mark pursed his lips and stayed silent for a minute. Finally, speaking very slowly and enunciating carefully, he said, "I think I liked it. I mean, I like you, Luke. You knew that, but... well... context. I like you enough that... oh god, I didn't think of that."

"Think of what?"

"That was my first kiss. I used my first kiss to... to..."

"Test a hypothesis? It does seem like sort of a waste of a perfectly good lifetime milestone." Luke picked a spot on the floor and stared at it. "But you know, it might be okay. I  
mean... I... you know... it wasn't... it wasn't too... you know. I didn't..."

"Hate it?" Mark suggested.

Luke shook his head, still staring at his bit of floor. "It's not even that. I didn't dislike it... I don't know. I've sort of been thrown for a loop here, Mark. My opinions on the matter will probably change a dozen times before Friday, and either way it goes... We're both way too smart for our own damn good, you know that, right?"

"I'm not sure I understand," Mark said.

"You're smart enough to realize that you had a perfectly good theory and a perfectly good experiment, and you went in and you did it, but you're also smart enough to know that one result isn't necessarily all the results you need to be sure. And I'm smart enough to know that I'm just at the beginning of puberty, and that means that my feelings are going to be all over the place, which means that even if I do decide tomorrow morning that I'm desperately in love with you, it could easily be a... an adolescent... stage. It would be a lot easier if we were poorly-directed bags of hormones with a screaming brain along for the ride, like normal people. A poorly directed bag of hormones would have gone to bed worrying that he might like boys, instead of popping back inside to see if he could find out for sure."

"Worrying?" Mark said. "Are muggles really that... against it?"

"Some of them are," Luke said. 

Silence fell again and he kept staring at his bit of floor, listening to the nighttime sounds of the castle. Mark's breathing layered over the sound of a shifting staircase, and the soft, almost inaudible sound of an air-circulating charm hard at work. Seconds ticked by, and then minutes, as the boys sat and brooded.

Over and over, Luke's brain went back to the thought, _I'm only twelve, I really shouldn't be dealing with this yet._

But of course, Mark's own uncertainty was, the way Luke was hearing it at least, partially his responsibility. He had planted the seed of doubt with a flippant, quick answer to a question that Mark couldn't answer after a nearly a month of thought. And Luke might be only twelve, but Mark would be turning thirteen in January, he was probably immensely worried that he hadn't paid enough attention to girls yet to pick out a favorite.

"Shit," Mark said, so quietly that Luke almost missed it.

"What?"

"You're going to hate me now. This is the sort of thing that ruins friendships."

Luke smiled at his piece of the floor. "Or maybe our future magic-babies will come to know this as the story of how daddy and daddy met."

"Don't," Mark said. "I'm really sorry, I should have just gone to bed."

Luke sighed, looked up at his friend. "We are not going to let something this stupid ruin our friendship. Don't do it again, okay, because then we'll have to have a talk about boundaries, but... we're fine, alright? We'll ignore it and pretend it never happened, and not mention it to anyone, and if you want to talk about it with me, we'll talk about it no earlier than May ninth of next year, at which point I will have been thirteen for a week and will either have some grand new insight or still be scared out of my mind by this whole concept, either of which ought to be very informative. Now I'm going to go to bed, and I'm going to try not to get caught in the corridors, but if I do, then at least it won't be the most stressful thing that happened to me all month."

And with that, he got up and walked out, and had to come back and grab his quidditch robes, and then he went off into the hallway again and made it back to the Slytherin common room without getting caught. The party was still going, and Marissa was there, and the first thing she did was to pull Luke over to dance with her, because somebody was playing music. It sounded live. Luke thought he recognized "Werewolves of London," but that couldn't be right, and if it was, he didn't want to bother trying to figure out why a muggle song was playing in the Slytherin common room.

"Marissa," Luke said, "I'm going to bed. Thanks for staying up to wait for me, but I'm... really tired."

"Oh," she said. "Well, that's okay. Goodnight." And she kissed him on the cheek as he turned away, as though she did it every night. She smelled just a little bit off, and Luke realized after a moment that there was a steady supply of butterbeer in the common room right then. 

He took in a deep breath, sort of a sigh in reverse, and headed off to the dormitories.

He didn't get any sleep.

\------------------------

"Luke," Teddy said, "Are you all right?"

 _Oh yeah,_ Luke thought. _Just questioning my sexuality way earlier than I thought I would if I ever did._

"Yeah," he said. "I'm fine. Just a little... um... I didn't get any sleep last night."

"Oh," Teddy shrugged. "Good job it's Sunday. Were you reading another one of those Stephen Prince books of yours?"

"King," Luke corrected him automatically, "and no. I was contemplating the inner working of my mind and the apparent cruelty of the universe."

"Um," Teddy said. "Okay." He looked around the table. "Did Mark say something disturbing last night? Did he say you were... Voldemorty or something?"

Luke looked up. Mark was sitting across the table from him, eating a bowl of Weasley's Dragon Crunch (a buncha cruncha dragon fun!) and absentmindedly breathing fire up at the ceiling.

"No," Luke said. "And if you don't mind, I'd rather not talk about it. Partially because you'd be just chock-full of understanding, and that would really just do the complete opposite of helping. Shouldn't Marissa be up here by now?"

Mark coughed and accidentally inhaled a bit of his fire. 

"Breathe, Mark," Violet said, thumping him on the back.

"That's what got me into this mess," Mark replied. Violet's ongoing thumping made it come out funny.

"No, being bad at breathing got you into this mess," Teddy said. "Do you want to go to the infirmary?"

"No," Mark said. "There's all sorts of safety charms to keep the flames from hurting me or burning anything, but it's still really uncomfortable."

He coughed a few more times and then went back to eating. Luke looked back down at his oatmeal. He would have liked to have some Dragon Crunch, but Mark had sat down and gotten it first, and Luke had panicked and gone with avoiding eating the same thing as Mark, because apparently that would just have to automatically mean that they were a couple. This was the way his brain worked when he hadn't slept.

He stole a glance up at Mark. Mark was blowing fire rings, and it was actually pretty impressive. Some rebellious little voice in the back of his head kept going, "well, why not" and then getting shouted down by the rest of his brain with a litany of reasons why it would be a bad idea, or why he couldn't even be sure if he actually liked boys, or if that was just his brain trying to justify not hating getting kissed by Mark. He couldn't help thinking that Voldemort would have solved this problem by the simple expedient of killing everyone and starting over with new friends. Not socially acceptable behavior, but sometimes, it could be relaxing to just sit and think that there was a road to simplicity and ease of mind, and it only required being absolutely, unquestionably, cartoonishly evil, so evil that you were actually objectively evil, which was one heck of a prerequisite, but still.

On the other hand, there was also a part of his mind that kept going, "but why would I," and getting shouted down by a much more specific litany of objections. After all, Mark was, if Luke was going to be honest with himself, probably his best friend. Loyal, and smart, and kind, and occasionally funny (though not nearly as often as he thought he was), and if Luke was going to go so far as to think this way, then yes, not exactly bad-looking. But then, he could say similar things about Teddy, or Violet, or Marissa. On the other hand...

Luke sighed. On the other hand, he had a thumb, also. He pulled out his wand and vanished his oatmeal. He wouldn't be finishing it, anyways. 

"Luke!"

"Oh thank god," Luke said. "Marissa, I want to talk to you. Alone. Um... get your food and then meet me in the abandoned prefects' bathroom on the fifth floor."

"Oh," Marissa said. "Um. All right."

Luke got up and walked out of the Great Hall. The ceiling was raining today, anyways. It would have been depressing to stay in there.

Luke headed upstairs, through a stairway that only ever presented itself to people who were too distracted to notice that they were taking a stairway that shouldn't exist. He stepped out onto the fifth floor, got about ten feet, and stopped short. He turned around and found the hall behind him noticeably empty of stairways.

"All right," he said, "I'll deal with the hallucinatory stairs later. Meeting time."

Marissa wasn't distracted, so she arrived about five minutes after Luke stepped into the abandoned bathroom. She was holding a plate with scrambled eggs and sausages on it.

"What on earth is this about, Luke?" she said.

"It's... It's really complicated. And I don't think I even want to explain, so... I'm just going to rant for a while, and when you think you've heard enough, tell me I'm being an enormous idiot and I'll shut up, but I've got to get vague problems off of my chest, all right?"

"Um, okay," Marissa said.

Luke took a deep breath.

"You know, the first thing I don't get is what he thought it would help. It's one dumb little experimental result, and you're dealing with a human being, so you need to do a whole bunch of tests because otherwise it's all just going to wind up being whatever result he thinks he wants. I mean, all right, so he can't really do a whole bunch of different tests, with, like, control groups and wide, diverse sample selection, because people would notice, and they'd get pretty irritated, and it would be a lot more chaos than it was really, honestly worth, and I get that, really, I do, but in that case it's just dumb to do any tests at all, because one test is nothing, one test is meaningless, so it's worse than nothing, because it can give you the wrong result for so many reasons!"

Luke began to pace back and forth as he spoke, gesticulating occasionally and acting very cross.

"And it's not just that it was just one test. That's bad form, all right, I know, but it was just one little test. It barely even took three seconds. Well, no, two seconds. Or was it four? But it wasn't a long enough test." He paused in mid-rant. "God, I wanted the test to last longer? I wonder if that's a result in and of itself. But that's not the point! The point is that he should have tried for a test that would last the rest of the year. But of course, at that point, that's not really a test, it's more... admitting that you don't need to do any testing. Unless you think of the... the standard, you know, the standard practices as a kind of testing on a more specific theory. I mean, it does all add up to 'hey, let's throw this at the wall and see if it sticks,' which is sort of what experimenting is.

"And on that note, who in the bloody hell experiments with... well, no, that's a stupid question, it's just that he called it 'testing a theory,' like he thought we were in a laboratory, but there weren't any bloody beakers around anywhere, so he should have stopped and bloody well thought for a minute, because it's not just a little theory, like, 'oh, this might be the way things are,' it's his friend's... interests. His friend's interests that he's toying with. I mean, its like... I used to freeze things in ice in the freezer at home because I wanted to be a scientist, and scientists do things and then look at what happens when you do them, and those were my experiments, but I never once... took..." He thought for a moment, casting about for the most sacred, inviolable object he could think of. "Took Mum's wedding ring and froze it in a cup of water to see what happens, because you just don't do that, it's a bad idea! But no, he just had to go and try it out, and now we're both extra-confused, instead of just him being just sort of confused. 

"And he could. Have. Bloody. Waited. I mean it's the sort of question that answers itself after a while, you don't have to go poking at it with a stick! It's like asking, 'well, am I going to die on November sixteenth?' and then shooting yourself in the head to see if you're going to die on November sixteenth. I mean, of course, you're going to die if you shoot yourself in the head, but why would you do that? You just wait through the sixteenth, and if the sixteenth gets done with and you're not dead, then hooray, you're not dead, and you didn't even go shooting yourself in the head."

He stared at the floor, sat down in the corner, and picked up a piece of fallen tile.

"What in the world happened last night that I missed?" Marissa stared as Luke fidgeted with the bit of tile in his hands.

"A game of chinese checkers," Luke said. "And an experiment gone horribly, horribly wrong."

Marissa sat down next to Luke, shoveled a forkful of scrambled eggs into her mouth and chewed thoughtfully. "What kind of experiment?"

"The kind I'd rather not tell you about."

"Who did it?"

"I'm not telling you that, either." Luke tossed his bit of tile at the swimming-pool-sized bathtub. It clattered around on top of the small pile of others in the tub. "Well... you'll figure it out anyways. It was Mark, and he bloody waited until we were alone, and then we had to sit up and talk for what seemed like forever."

Marissa stared over at the tub. She took a bite of sausage, mulled over things carefully. "Whatever he did, it didn't absolutely ruin your friendship, it just really threw you off."

Luke nodded. 

"You're really not going to tell me what it was?"

Luke shook his head.

"You're going to make me guess," Marissa said.

"No," Luke said. There was a brief pause as he continued to stare down at the floor. "Not if you don't want to."

"You know better than that," Marissa informed him, and Luke privately thought that this was, quite possibly, a part of his problem.

"Can I have a hint?" Marissa asked.

Luke looked over at her. "It's not a guessing game, Marissa. If you really feel like you just absolutely have to know, then you can swear to secrecy and I'll tell you, but don't take it lightly."

Marissa paused, thought a little while longer. "Should I be angry at Mark?"

"I suppose that depends on what I do about it," Luke said.

"Should I be angry at you?"

"I suppose that depends on if you should be angry at Mark."

Luke picked up another piece of tile, tossed it in the air, and watched it shatter on the floor. He pulled out his wand, pointed it at the tile, and snapped, "reparo." The tile zipped back together, and Luke sighed. "I don't suppose I could get you to obliviate me? I mean, just to make my life simpler."

"In order to obliviate someone, you have to know what you're eliminating," Marissa said.

"Right. Naturally." Luke thought for a moment. "Then have you got some kind of magical time machine so I can go back and create a paradox? Maybe stop myself from saying the stupid thing that got stupid Mark stupid thinking in the first stupid place?"

"No," Marissa said. "What was he thinking about?"

Luke sighed, buried his face in his hands. "You," he said. "Among other things."

Luke sat there and waited as the gears ticked over in Marissa's head, and finally she said, "Then he likes me. Only... no, why would I be mad at him about that? And it depends on oh my god he likes you." Luke said nothing, just waited for the remaining few dominoes to fall. Another long silence later, Marissa added, "And you like him, too."

"Not exactly," Luke said. "I mean... I never even thought about it before. But I kinda feel like... like maybe I might. It's different for muggles, Marissa. You remember that Dumbledore biography, how it said that Dumbledore was... you know... gay? If the headteacher of the most prominent muggle school in England was called out as gay, it would be a big scandal. There would be protests, against and for the teacher, and there would be people saying that he was trying to spread his... gayness, I guess. His gay philosophy? That he was trying to corrupt the students. I mean, in Mark's shoes, I would have been... I would have been so afraid, but he was raised by a wizarding family, in the wizarding world, and that just sort of automatically means that he was never once told that it was wrong to be gay, because that sort of thought just doesn't occur to wizarding people, it's a thing that muggles do, but it's just so... it's so automatic... You know, I'm actually a little scared of the idea that I do like him back."

Luke picked up another bit of tile, closed his eyes, and started transfiguring it. He had read in one of the Dumbledore biographies that Albus Dumbledore had sometimes done transfigurations to relax.

"Well," Marissa said, "I'd definitely be sort of... sad about it if you did decide that you liked him back. And yeah, I guess I'd be a little mad at both of you. But you're still my friend, Luke. If you need to talk, just tell me, alright?"

Luke nodded. "Yeah," he said. 

Marissa stood up, kissed him on the cheek, and walked out of the room. The door banged closed behind her and the sound echoed off the stone walls.

Luke looked down at the tile he'd been transfiguring. A rough sculpture stood in its place. Luke couldn't be sure, but he thought it sort of looked like Mark.

"Reducto," he snapped, and the sculpture shattered and burst and the pieces went spinning off in all directions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, hands up, who here didn't see that coming?
> 
> Right, all of you should be ashamed of yourselves. It was telegraphed like a baby announcement.


	3. Burn, Baby, Burn

Luke didn't talk to Mark at all for the rest of the day. For that matter, he didn't really talk to anyone very much. Instead, he sulked in the dormitories except for at meal times, when he emerged to eat in sullen silence, glancing up at Mark throughout the meals. By dinner, his black mood had become infectious, and even Teddy seemed to be caught up in it. Luke elected not to tell anyone else what was worrying him. Letting Marissa know had been hard enough, and he didn't want to go through that again. Of course, being in such a dark mood had drawbacks. Hieronymus Runel, for instance, noticed it and decided that this was the best possible time to try to do a little bonding with Luke  
Luke was sitting back on his four-poster bed, reading Duma Key when Runel cleared his throat and said "Luke? Are you all right?"

Luke sighed and put down the book. "Hello, Hieronymus. I suppose you're trying to suck up to me in a completely pointless effort to gain favor with a dark lord that I keep telling you doesn't exist?"

"Or maybe I'm just trying to be friendly?"

"Oh, of course you are," Luke said. "Why didn't I think of that, Hieronymus Runel has seen the error of his ways and is coming to talk to the resident mudblood of Slytherin! Hallelujah, saints be praised there is hope for every man!"

Runel looked down at the floor. "That's not... That's not it."

"Well it's either one or the other, Ronny. Take your pick. Do you need a few minutes to think it over?"

Runel looked around, shifting his gaze back and forth. There was no one else in the dormitory, but he still said, "Can we have the rest of this conversation in my tent?"

"No." Luke said. "Or, more to the point, hell no."

Runel took a deep breath and let it out. "Then, really," he said, "I shouldn't have this conversation at all, but it needs to be said." He pulled out his wand and pointed it generally ceilingward. "Muffliato. Look, Luke, My Lord, I know I shouldn't have come to you in the infirmary last year, it was stupid, I could have blown everything. You had to tell me no, and I understand that, really I do, but please, just give me another chance."

Luke's jaw slowly dropped as Runel spoke. He had actually logicked his way to that conclusion. The boy was clearly delusional. "You know, Ronny," Luke said, "I really do believe you may be dangerously insane. I know, you want me to be Voldemort so I can go and break your father out of Azkaban, but that's not going to happen. I'm not Voldemort. We've had this conversation before."

"I don't understand why you keep refusing," Runel said.

"Because if your father really was a Death Eater, then he was evil. He belongs in Azkaban, and even if I could break him out, I wouldn't. I wouldn't break anyone out of Azkaban, because I'm not Lord Voldemort. I'm very adamant about that, Hieronymus, I'm not Lord Voldemort. I don't want to be Lord Voldemort. I don't like Lord Voldemort or the idea of doing the things Lord Voldemort did. He tortured people, Hieronymus. He killed people. His minions went around and tortured and killed and raped and stole and sabotaged and enslaved and all sorts of other really terrible, awful things, and they did it all on his orders. He was evil, and I'm not."

Runel stared at Luke like he couldn't believe what he was hearing, then waved his wand in a dismissive sort of a way. For a moment Luke thought Runel was going to attack him, but then Runel turned and walked away, and Luke realized that he had just been dismissing the spell he had cast.

Luke was almost disappointed.

\--------------------

The next few days went on in a fairly similar way, and Luke's dark mood seemed to hang over the others like a cloud. Mark never quite came out and said anything about it, but the way he looked at Luke, Luke could tell that he wanted to.

Finally, Wednesday rolled around, and Dueling Club met up again. Professor Shelly had spent a lot of time showing the students how to do some of her favorite spells, Native American spelldances, and Luke had recently mastered--or at least learned--one of the more complex ones, and had been looking forward to the chance to use it in a duel.  
Marissa squared off against him, and they raised their wands, and Luke rushed into motion.

A shield spell to give him time, and then he backed off and started the incantation, waving his wand through a complex series of movements and his feet through an odd, two-step dance, shuffling his feet back and forth.

"Oconomo seno cendasama led ensuke teweda rok!"

He shouted the spell, and a network of vines erupted from the floor of the Great Hall and formed a thick wall all the way around Marissa.

"Hey," she shouted, a little muffled, and Luke dropped his shield spell and walked over to jam his wand through one of the tiny gaps in the wall.

"Stupefy," He said, and there was a muffled thump from inside the wall.

Luke nodded and cast the counterspell and the vines retreated into the ground without a trace. Marissa was at the center of the circle the vines had formed, slumped over unconscious on the floor. Luke nodded, satisfied, and revived her just as Professor Shelly's voice called out "Very well done, Luke!"

He turned around and saw the professor bearing down on him with a huge smile on her face. "Fourth years usually have trouble with that spell. Of course, it's not supposed to have gaps in it usually, but you used them to your advantage. Very well done."

"Thank you, Professor," Luke said. "I'm just glad it worked as well as--" He was interrupted by a thud and a burst of flame from a few mats away. He turned and his eyes got really huge as he saw the most disturbing thing he'd seen all year (and he'd seen Teddy calmly eating a bowl of mint chocolate frog ice cream). 

Violet was standing across from Teddy, her body wreathed in flames, so hot they burned blue. Her robes were burning away, and she pulled into a crouch, yelling, and barely audible at that over the crackling, whooshing sound of the flames around her body.

"Oh, hell," Professor Shelly said. She ran over to her daughter and crouched down as close as she could get. It wasn't very close. Luke could feel the heat radiating off of Violet even at his distance.

"Violet!" Professor Shelly cried over the roaring of the flames. "Violet, fight it! Oh hell..."

She raised up her wand and a stream of water poured over Violet. Moments later, Professor Leiman was beside her, his cane also dousing Violet in water, and yet the flames did not abate. If anything, they got worse, steam roiling off of Violet in great, billowing clouds. A number of sixth and seventh years, and even a few fourth and fifth years, stepped up and shouted, "Aguamenti", and the impromptu fire brigade managed, at least, to keep the fire from spreading all through the Great Hall, but Violet herself continued to burn, and to yell. Words were almost inaudible over the chaos in the Great Hall, but as Luke watched, he got the impression that Violet was in pain, and quite a lot of it. It couldn't be from the flames themselves, as she wasn't being consumed by them, only... emitting them somehow. Finally, he realized why. The floor beneath her was glowing red hot with the heat of her flames, and her feet must be burning horribly. 

Luke jumped forwards and raised up his wand and cried "Wingardium leviosa!" and Violet didn't lift up at all. A few moments later, Marissa seemed to get to the same conclusion, or else to decide that she trusted Luke's judgment enough to do the same thing without knowing why, and she shouted the spell as well, and still Violet remained stubbornly rooted to the ground. 

Teddy shouted the spell next, and then a third year Ravenclaw girl shouted "Her feet are burning! Get her off the floor! Wingardium leviosa!" and a dozen more shouts followed that and Violet lifted slowly off of the floor. Professor Leiman shifted his cane's aim and the water from his cane rushed over Violet's feet.

Luke had spent almost a year of his life in a hospital once. He knew what third degree burns looked like. The bottoms of Violet's feet, even through the obscuring flames, were not covered in third degree burns. They were far, far worse.

Professor Flitwick rushed past Luke, raising his wand, and Violet fell unconscious, but still continued to burn. The tiny professor shook his head, turned, and roared "Expecto patronum!"

A shining silver bird rushed from the end of his wand and out of the Great Hall, and he pointed his wand at his throat and yelled, "Everyone, out of the Great Hall, now! Professors only!" His voice boomed as he spoke, and it would have been comical if Luke hadn't been utterly certain that Violet was about to die.

"Professor Flitwick," Luke said. "Is Violet going to--"

"Violet will be all right, now get out, young man." The authority in his voice was such that Luke turned and ran out of the Great Hall, and the other students with him. 

Even outside the Hall, with the great oak doors closed tight, the sound of Violet's burning could be heard, and Luke danced nervously from one foot to the other as Marissa, then Teddy found him and stood by his side. A few minutes later, Mark showed up, and without a word, he took the hand that wasn't being squeezed by Marissa. 

Teddy looked at the door with a sort of horrified shock on his face, listening in mild disbelief to Professor Flitwick's occasional orders and exclamations. Twice, some teacher hustled past the four friends and into the Great Hall, first Professor Gills, and then Professor Orkney, and still the fire continued to burn, until, finally, the doors to the Entrance Hall burst open and a tall, arrogant-faced man rushed inside, running past. Luke had a quick impression of brown hair and sunglasses, a hastily-thrown-on duster and shorts over a pair of tennis shoes that were barely passable as footwear anymore, and the man pounded a fist on the door of the Great Hall, and rushed through, and a few moments later, the sound of the fire died down.

Luke breathed a soft sigh of relief.

There were a few quiet mutters from inside the Great Hall, and then the man emerged once more, carrying Violet in his arms. There was a blanket wrapped around her, and her head was lolling back, but she was obviously breathing. One of her feet stuck out of the bottom of the blanket, and it was mercilessly ravaged. 

The man cast a long, lingering look at Luke, and then he turned and walked out of the school.

Mark released his deathgrip on Luke's hand and ran after the man.

"Excuse me, sir," he said, but the man ignored him and kept walking, out the door and onto the grounds. As Mark ran to follow him, the door slammed shut in his face and bolted itself. 

Luke sat down, hard. He knew who the man had been, of course. It could only have been Violet's father, the man who had been able to stop the flames the day that Violet missed the shopping trip, but why was he taking Violet away, unless he thought she was too dangerous to have in the school? And more worrying, why did a powerful wizard like that, a man who was able to put out a magical fire with ease, believe that Violet was so dangerous?

Marissa sat down next to Luke on the floor, and he could feel her shaking beside him, sobbing as the adrenaline wore off. Mark, too, came and sat down, and he was shaking, too, shaking like a leaf. Before Luke could do anything to comfort either one of them, they had both slumped over and buried their faces in his shoulders. They didn't have long to stay that way. The doors to the Great Hall opened up and Professor Flitwick emerged, looking like he had just aged about twenty years.

"The crisis is past," he said. "Miss Leiman will be fine, but you are all to return to your common rooms while the Great Hall is repaired."

Luke, Mark, and Marissa stood up, and Luke looked at Mark for a moment, and then drew him into a tight, fearsome hug. It lasted only a few moments, long enough for Luke to whisper, "I'm sorry if I've been a jerk lately. If you need to talk, just come talk, okay."

He turned and left, with Marissa trailing behind him.

\------------------------

Luke sat down at his usual desk in Defense class and waited. Usually, Professor Shelly met them at the door, but today was, understandably, different. The class sat down, and settled down, and then a woman walked in, looking harried and harassed, and set down a large stack of books on the desk.

The witch, who was decidedly not Professor Shelly, walked to the chalkboard and began writing. There was something undeniably familiar about her, but Luke couldn't quite place it until she turned and started passing out the books with a few deft waves of her wand. Each time that a book came off the top of the stack, it was replaced by another, so that the books flying through the air were a constant stream and there were enough for everyone.

What she had written on the chalkboard was _Dr. Hermione Weasley,_ and she was definitely the bushy-haired witch that had been on the panel at Luke's trial last year.

"Hello, class," she said. "Terribly sorry I'm late, but I've had the hardest time getting ahold of these books and they all came in at once, and... well." She looked around at the class and smiled like she was genuinely happy to be facing down a bunch of twelve and thirteen year olds from traditionally antagonistic houses. "I'm Doctor Weasley, and I'll be teaching this class while Professor Leiman is out"

Luke was impressed by this. He doubted that she had a doctorate in medicine, but he'd only even heard of a very, very few witches and wizards who were doctors of any kind. Higher education simply didn't occur to most of them.

"Now," Doctor Weasley said, "Since your original professor is still drawing up a lesson plan for the next week or so, I thought that I would run you through a what-not-to-do of dealing with the dark arts. We have here Wanderings With Werewolves, by Gilderoy Lockhart, who was exposed as a fraud quite some time ago. He writes about an encounter with a werewolf in Armenia. Please note, he did not actually encounter this werewolf. If you find yourself faced with a werewolf, and all that you can think of to defend yourself with is what Lockhart says in his book, run away. Doing what he does will get you killed. Now, let's see why. Everyone, please open to page three hundred and sixteen."

Luke looked down at the book. The cover was bright and flashy and extremely beat up. It had a picture of a handsome-but-boring wizard on it. Someone had charmed it so that the wizard's face had a permanent handlebar moustache and vacantly stupid look. He grinned and opened up the book to page three hundred and sixteen.

"Third paragraph down, and begin reading until the end of the page," Doctor Weasley said.

Luke found the spot and began reading.

"I was in quite a sticky spot at this point, trapped as I was between the werewolf, the angry villagers, and the river. There were any number of escapes available to me, but none of them would let me keep the villagers alive.  
Penelope, the woman who had stuck faithfully by my side through my long, complex, and often tedious investigation, clung to my side and wailed in terror, and I was forced to think quickly. Fortunately for all involved, I am a very snappy dresser, and was wearing my best robes, a quality Egyptian affair with blue trim around the hem and lovely gilding on the pockets, both gold and silver. Of course, what little silver was there wouldn't be enough, and I was forced to remove my eighteenth-century silver broach, which you will surely recall was a gift from the Queen herself, as well. I cast a number of charms on all such potentially useful jewelry as soon as I get hold of it, and this broach was no different. It came off easily in my hands and I activated one of the charms on it, so that it drew the silver in my robe's gilding to itself. From there, I was able to work. I began a transfiguration the likes of which I had never attempted before, and hope never to attempt again.  
It is a well-known fact that werewolves, in their wolf form, abhor silver, and are even burned by contact with it. I was able to use the material in the broach, combined with the material in the gilding, to create a cage of very fine wire for the wolf. A few more moments of transfiguration produced a second, wooden cage from among the twigs fallen on the forest floor, and I combined the two with a few deft swipes of my wand, so that the wooden cage was gilded as my robes had been, though I daresay the overall effect was more spectacular. I hoisted the cage into the treetops with only moments to spare and the werewolf came to the banks of the river. She was even more terrible up close, with fearsome eyes and a set of teeth to rival my own (if frightening appearance were as highly valued as the elusive goal of dental perfection that I have always tried so hard to achieve). I lured her closer, and when I had at last gotten her to where I wanted her, I cast the impediment curse and dropped the cage at once. The werewolf, which had so easily eluded capture before, was no match for the combined force of curse and cage, and was soon trapped, cowering away from the bars of her gilded prison. Mere moments behind her was the mob of angry villagers, and upon seeing the man they assumed was the werewolf with the werewolf itself, they stopped, amazed at the magnitude of their mistake, for if they had not seen this sight, surely they would have tried to kill my own sweet, innocent self.  
I must confess that I am something of a bleeding heart at times, and therefore I did not speak to them as harshly as perhaps I should have. Instead, I said only 'here is your true werewolf' and cast the homorphous charm, forcing the wolf back to her original form, the old woman Wilhelmina."

Luke stared at the book. He'd done plenty of reading on werewolves after he learned that Teddy's late father was a werewolf, and there were so many things wrong with that passage that he sort of wanted to cry a little bit. He raised his hand.

"Yes," Doctor Weasley said. "Mister... ah, Mister Restimen. It's quite nice to see you in a more... normal setting."

"Um, Doctor Weasley," Luke said, "Am I entirely wrong, or did the man who wrote this book teach Defense Against the Dark Arts here while you were attending this school?"

"He did," Doctor Weasley said.

Luke nodded. "Right. Um, no offense, but how is it that you didn't die from some piece of bad advice that he gave you?"

There was laughter all around the room, and Doctor Weasley smiled indulgently. "For the most part, I simply didn't pay any attention to him. Now, would you care to explain precisely what was wrong with that passage?"

"He said that the impediment jinx does something other than what it actually does," Luke said. "Although he gets bonus points for calling it a curse. I can only assume that that much wrongness is the result of deliberate effort. Yes, you can hurt a werewolf with silver, but only if you make them eat it. The homorphous charm doesn't work to force a werewolf back to their normal form, because the werewolf transformation is a kind of runaway transfiguration that's always happening when the moon is full, so before the charm finished working, the werewolf would be a wolf again. Also, if the angry mob had elected to lynch Gilderoy Lockhart, they all would have been much safer, because this passage was obviously written by a dangerously stupid man."

The rest of the lesson consisted of turning to various pages and discussing the terrible, terrible mistakes in Lockhart's book. Doctor Weasley mentioned that after Lockhart was revealed as a fraud, a small and short-lived but busy industry had sprung up printing books that corrected the mistakes in Lockhart's books, which was truly impressive. Being so colossally wrong that an industry developed around correcting your stupidity was an accomplishment in the field of terrible on par with winning an award for the most broken bones.

Still, the distraction of a temporary Defense substitute wasn't enough to keep Luke's mind off of Violet, and as soon as classes were over, he went to the dungeons to talk to Professor Leiman.

Luke knocked on Professor Leiman's door, and it opened of its own accord. There were at least five books spread out on Professor Leiman's desk, and he had a notebook in his hands, in which he was writing.

"Luke," he said. "I expected you would show up eventually. I take it you're inquiring after Violet?"

Luke nodded. "Yes sir. Is she all right?"

"She's doing much better," Professor Leiman said. "Her new caretakers will be teaching her to control her problem and then returning her to Hogwarts. She'll be gone a few months, at most. Oh, and her father brought me a note for you. It's on the table, over there"

He pointed to a little table in the corner of the room. A slip of yellow paper sat on it, and Luke went over and picked it up. "How are her feet?"

"Much improved. I'm afraid she's going to be bedridden for a few days even so, but she'll make a full recovery. As the fire that damaged her wasn't magical, the scars should be minimal. It's quite lucky that you noticed she was heating up the floor. If you hadn't, I suspect she would have died before too long."

Luke nodded. "Thank you for your help, sir."

"You're quite welcome," Professor Leiman said, and Luke left his office and headed for the Great Hall. 

He walked in in the middle of dinner and sat down with Mark, Teddy, and Marissa, pulling the note from Violet out of his pocket. 

It was written in shaky handwriting on a scrap of what looked to Luke like it might have been papyrus. 

My friends. I am not allowed to tell you where I am, but it is very cold here. I have been given a tutor in controlling my fire problem, and am already being taught exercises meant to control it. I am told that it was Luke who realized that I needed to be lifted from the floor of the Great Hall, and for that I am grateful, and I suppose I always will be. My feet still hurt terribly, but they are getting better all the time, and I am told I will be up and about in a few days. I must go now, as it is only 'in deference to my youth' that I am allowed to write to you at all, and this note must be smuggled out so that I can write another later.  
All my love  
~Violet

Luke sighed, and passed the note around. "Well, thank god," Teddy said when it got to him. "I was starting to think that she was going to be crippled, and that wouldn't be any fun at all."

Luke thought that, no, that probably wouldn't be fun, but Violet would probably like it even less than Teddy. He didn't say anything like that, but he certainly thought it. 

"She was going to play her first quidditch game on Saturday," he said instead. "And now she's going to miss it. I was going to get to play against her."

"Well," Marissa said, "Now you haven't got to lose against her so badly."

"Hush, you," Luke said, even as Teddy started chuckling at that comment.

"She's right, though," Mark said. "I've watched Violet play. She's really good."

"Well, yes. That's because she's already terrifying, and I think I've mentioned that I think beaters are basically flying sociopaths with great big wooden truncheons."

"You're just mad because you don't get your own great big wooden truncheon," Teddy said.

There was a certain very small grain of truth to that. Luke thought it was terribly unfair that the other players didn't at least get a helmet, but then, a helmet wouldn't help that much in a seven-story fall, anyways.

\-----------------------

The next day at breakfast, Teddy got an owl. It looked utterly bushed, and was of a species that Luke wasn't familiar with. It glared daggers at Teddy as he unstrapped the letter from its leg, and then flew away with an air of absolute loathing.

"Who's the letter from?" Mark asked while Teddy opened it up. Teddy tossed the empty envelope to Mark, and Mark examined it closely. "Oh," he said. "Violet."

Teddy read the letter. It was written on the same papyrus-ish stuff as the note from Leiman's office had been, but seemed to be much longer.

"What does she have to say?" Marissa asked.

"Nothing" Teddy said obstinately. "She said absolutely nothing at all to you." After a few moments he corrected himself. "Apparently, she's only allowed one letter a day. She wanted to write to me today. Or, well, yesterday. I think this is the 'another' that she mentioned in her note. And she says she can't wait to see us all again, but she doesn't know when that will be."

He finished reading, and smiled very slightly. "She's just fine. Told me a bunch of little details that I'm not sharing with any of you, but she's fine."

"Oh my god, she is your girlfriend," Marissa said.

"She is not my girlfriend," Teddy exclaimed. "She is a girl, and she is my friend. Those are two entirely different things!" As he spoke, his hair turned a sullen shade of brown, and he crossed his arms. 

Luke had to admit that he was skeptical. Details that Teddy wasn't sharing? That sounded like girlfriend sorts of things.

He glanced over at Mark, and at Marissa. They both knew things about him that they wouldn't tell to anybody else. He supposed that he didn't really have any right to judge. The rest of the day was spent either not paying much attention to lessons (except for defense, which had just gotten very full of big, complicated words and therefore sort of interesting, and potions, which involved brewing something called Ulric's Unbelievable Exploding Ointment) or speculating on Violet's fate. 

Saturday brought a letter for Luke, consisting of more updates. It was gradually becoming clear that Violet was in a school of magic full of others who had her same peculiar problem. The difference seemed to be that she was one of only a dozen students, and that was about as far as the letter went on details. Luke had the distinct impression that even that was more information than her instructors wanted her to give away.

Luke shared the information, and his suspicions, with the others, and then he headed off to get ready for that afternoon's quidditch game.

"Alright," Phineas said as the team got ready to head out onto the pitch. "We're up against the Gryffindors today. They haven't really shown us the respect we deserve in the past, but today we'll be teaching them a lesson. They'll learn to be a little humbler around us from now on, right? Parker, you and I are going to be going after the Gryffindor keeper. They're down one beater, working with a replacement, so we've got the advantage there. Restimen, you've done so well before, you're our front chaser. Casstage and Menteith, you're on the seeker, keep him distracted. Roan, back up Restimen." Phineas fixed each of his players in turn with a sharp gaze as he spoke, then called out, "All right. Let's go!"  
They headed out to the pitch itself and Luke found himself once again in the center of a cheering crowd. Red covering plastered the walls on some towers, green on others. He found that he could enjoy it a little more now that he wasn't absolutely terrified of taking a bludger to the head in front of everyone. 

The weather, though, was awful. The day had started with light fog, which had only gotten heavier as a light drizzle joined it. By now, the grounds were basically made of mud, anyone in glasses had had to charm them to be able to see (Mark was quite proficient with that particular spell out of sheer necessity), and Luke was immensely grateful for the warming charm on his quidditch robes, which was about the only reason he was even remotely comfortable in the nearly-freezing air. He was just lucky it wasn't at the freezing point. Luke was fairly sure that if it had been, the fog was thick enough that it would freeze solid.

Luke mounted up his broomstick as Madam Hooch appeared from somewhere beyond the fog, and she gave them a little smile and said, "All right, now I want a fair game. Don't go thinking that you'll be too hard to see in this fog. I was a seeker for thirty years before I ever came to teach, and the Holyhead Harpies played and won in worse than this."

One of the Gryffindors made a disappointed noise, and Madam Hooch's smile grew a little wider. Everyone mounted up and flew up as high as they could. Luke found himself facing down Harry Harcourt, an unreasonably large seventh year. Harcourt was grinning like he'd just been given an early Christmas present, showing a row of misaligned teeth. The boy, Luke decided, was ugly. "Think you're going to win like you did against the eggheads in Ravenclaw?" he said.

Luke grinned right back at him. "Probably easier. After all, you're so ugly your whole team must be half-blind by now."

Harcourt looked like he very much wanted to start testing out some experimental jinxes on Luke, but just at that moment, the bludgers zipped past, one after the other, and and started their circling overhead as they waited for the signal for the start of the game. Luke had read in the course of his research on quidditch that bludgers had only begun being charmed to not immediately attack anyone and everyone around them about five years earlier. Now, they waited for the whistle at the start of the game. Apparently, one had to be used in an attempt to kill the Prime Minister before they decided that maybe they should not be incredibly dangerous.

Madam Hooch blew the whistle and tossed the quaffle, and Luke rushed for it, but Harcourt got it first. 

Luke rushed after him, with Jeremy Roan behind him and Phineas and Eloise rushing off to find bludgers. They blasted through the fog as the commentator started up.

"I'm pretty sure the game has started, but it's really hard to be sure in this fog. Oh, no, they're definitely flying around out there. There is certainly quidditch happening out there."

Luke caught up with Harcourt at about the same time as Jeremy, and the two of them took turns hassling the Gryffindor, but it didn't really do much good. Harcourt was simply too good at keeping the quaffle away from them, and he managed to get it past the keeper with relatively little trouble in the thick fog. Friedrich Masing could be heard swearing up a storm behind Luke as he went after the quaffle again, but before he or Jeremy could get to it, Harcourt had it again, and he was coming around for what would almost certainly be another ten points, when a bludger came screaming out of the mist and smacked him smartly on the shoulder. Harcourt let out a yell and dropped the quaffle. Luke thought he might really be hurt, and made a note to find out as soon as he could if he didn't find out in the course of the game, but for now, he just went after the quaffle himself, grabbing it out of the denser fog lower to the ground.

"And... yes, it looks like Restimen has the quaffle," the commentator cried as Luke emerged into that rarefied upper stratum of the pitch where the fog was thin enough to permit vision. He looked around and saw Phineas waving towards him, and flew over to the team captain. "Come up at them from below," Phineas called to him when he got to about ten feet away, and Luke nodded and dived down. There were probably better than even odds of getting nailed by a bludger nobody would even see coming down in the thicker fog, but then, it sounded like Phineas and Eloise had both of the bludgers under their control and were battering the Gryffindor keeper with a constant barrage of flying cannonballs.  
They were, after all, flying sociopaths with great big wooden truncheons, and they were certainly acting the part.

Luke approached the goalpost, found the base of one of them, and flew straight up with the quaffle in his hand. It was a valid play, but it would never work anywhere but in thick fog like this, and even then, only if the other team's keeper was badly distracted. Luke had moments, every once in a while, where he actually liked his teammates. The fog started thinning out faster and faster as he got towards the top of the goalpost, the ring, and he could see the Gryffindor keeper dodging a bludger, twirling on her broomstick and even clocking one of the bludgers with the bristles. She dodged one particularly well-aimed bludger with a dive, and let out a little yell as she saw Luke barreling up from below, moving fast. She dodged out of the way of his headlong charge and he tossed the quaffle through the ring. It was caught on the other side by Jeremy, who brought it around to the next ring over and tossed it through. Luke caught it and came around, barely dodging a bludger that skimmed past him and hit the Gryffindor keeper. He looked up to see which of the Gryffindor beaters had done it and found Eloise looking shamefaced. "Sorry" she called out, just as one of the Gryffindor beaters finally did appear, shooting past her with his bat held high in his hand.

Luke whirled to find the Gryffindor keeper dashing off away from him with a bludger in hot pursuit, and he tossed the quaffle through the nearest ring.

Jeremy caught it on the other side and tossed it back, and they repeated the process twice before the Gryffindor keeper managed to get in between them, by which point the air around them was so crowded with broomsticks and bludgers that they were going to have to move soon anyways. The Gryffindor keeper had managed to get the quaffle to Harcourt, who was favoring his left arm, and there was another chase. Harcourt dived into the fog, and Phineas and Eloise batted the bludgers after him in rapid succession. There was a long pause and then a yell from in the fog, and Harcourt came back up without the quaffle. His right arm looked like it was very possibly broken. Madam Hooch's whistle sounded and she came down out of the fog as the action slowed to a halt. She drew up next to Harcourt and inspected his arm, exchanging a few words with him, and then raising up her wand and waving it a few times. Harcourt's arm unbroke and he nodded, and then Madam Hooch pointed her want at her throat and shouted, "The quaffle has been dropped. Lead chasers from both teams, to this position, and the quaffle will be re-thrown."

Luke headed over to her and took up his position across from the big Gryffindor. Madam Hooch pointed her wand at her throat again and muttered something that sounded like "quietus", and then she pointed her wand at the fog bank below and the quaffle zipped up to her hand. She dropped below Luke and Harcourt, blew her whistle, and tossed the quaffle up. One and then the other bludger emerged from the fog, racing towards the players, and Luke rushed to retrieve the quaffle. This time, he got it, just as the commentator yelled "And one of the seekers is going after the snitch! Is that... Yes, it's Menteith! Wow, look at him go! And he's into the fog with Winder on his heels!"  
There was a brief, anticipatory hush, and then fifteen goals worth of points were added to Gryffindor's score.

"And Winder has it! Gryffindor wins!" The commentator's cry echoed around the pitch, and Luke scowled.

"Well that's not very fair. We were slaughtering them."

"All's fair in love, war, and quidditch," Harcourt said from behind Luke.

Luke privately disagreed. He'd read all sorts of books on quidditch, and they all pointed out the same thing: if you don't have a decent seeker, you usually lose.

He was still fuming about it when he got to dinner.

"I mean, at that point," he said, "it's more like two different games!"

"You know, pretty much every muggle-born complains about this at some point," Teddy said. "Unless they get to be seekers, and then they realize that it's fun to be the seeker, and that's why you have the seeker."

"But a hundred and fifty points?" Luke said. "We were ahead by eighty points, and we lost by seventy!"

Teddy shrugged. "That's why it's an exciting game. It can turn around just like that."

Luke let his head flop to the table. He was picturing this same conversation happening thousands and thousands of times over the last seven hundred and fifty years, and the poor little mudblood (he had given up and started internalizing the word ages ago. He called himself a mudblood in public now, and it drove the other Slytherins crazy, because dammit, it was an insult, you shouldn't be proud of it) just always got shouted down, because that was how the game was played, what were you going to do, make the snitch go away?

"But why one hundred and fifty points?" Luke said. "I mean, okay, yes, I know the traditional reason, that the first snidget was worth one hundred and fifty galleons, but after the first three hundred World Cups that got ruined by a seeker, you'd think they would have decided to bring it down to something reasonable. Like fifty points. If you're getting totally slaughtered, fifty points won't save you, but it will save you if you're only behind by four goals!"

"But that's ridiculous!" Teddy shouted. "You can't just go chopping a hundred points off of it!"

"Actually," Mark said, "That might be a good compromise. Keep the traditionalists from losing it, and make the muggle-borns who want to get rid of it a little happier. You should write a letter to the ICWQC."

"I'm sorry," Luke said, "but the what now?"

"The International Confederation of Wizards Quidditch Committee," Mark replied. "They regulate quidditch."

"Really?" Luke said. "You don't say? Because you know, with a name like that, I thought they must be all about herbology."

"Hey," Mark said. "I'm on your side here. I've always sort of thought it was a bit much."

"Oh yeah?" Teddy said. "And who do you support?"

"The Liverpool Pounders," Mark said. 

"Yeah," Teddy replied. "The Liverpool Pounders, who haven't had a seeker win in four centuries. Their seeker is opposed to the existence of his own position."

"No he's not," Marissa said. "The rest of the team is, but the seeker isn't."

Luke started actually pounding his head on the table.

"I'll help you write that letter if you want," Mark said.

"I think we ought to be a little more proactive than that," Luke said after a few moments. "I think I'm starting to get an idea."

\----------------------

Turnout was lower than Luke expected. Of Hogwarts' total student body, about a quarter were muggle-born. Of those, about thirty had arrived. Luke had considered calling his little movement the Seeker Eaters. Mark had advised him that he would probably be lynched if he did. Luke had subsequently rejected the idea of making everybody come in long cloaks and passing out masks at the door. What good was being the last remnant of a great evil if you couldn't be a total loon about it sometimes?

Still, Mark's logic had prevailed, and so Luke was sitting on a desk that was, for some reason, covered in fur, in an unused classroom on the seventh floor, watching as the last few stragglers filtered in before Mark closed the door precisely as six PM rolled around.

"Alright," Luke said. "It looks like we're all here, so I'll get started. We all know what happened at the Slytherin-Gryffindor game. I notice that there isn't one single Gryffindor in here. I also notice that there's a lot of Ravenclaws, so that tells you that at least we have a clever idea about what's wrong with quidditch. Now, raise your hand if you think the snitch ought to be completely eliminated."

Almost everyone raised their hands. Luke grinned. "I've got a better idea," he said."The problem with the snitch is that it's worth too much. We can all see that, either because we grew up with sane games like football and cricket, or because we're smart enough to stop and think about it, or because somebody else pointed it out to us. But trying to get it removed completely will never work, everyone else likes it too much. So what I'm thinking is that we ought to try to get it changed to just fifty points. Maybe seventy-five, but fifty would be the best. Who's with me?"

Hands started going up. 

Ten days later, fifty-one bright white owls with identical golden-snitch-printed envelopes arrived in the Great Hall at breakfast and Luke realized that it was going to take a lot more than half a hundred Hogwarts students to change a seven hundred year old tradition. 

No matter how stupid it was.

He leaned over to Mark and said, "Well, I suppose I'll just have to play harder."

"It was a good try, though," Mark said. "We can try to keep the protests going."

"Spread the idea, I think," Luke said as one of the owls dropped a letter in front of him. He pulled it open and read out his letter from the International Confederation of Having a Really Unnecessarily Long Name that Could Easily be Replaced With "International Quidditch Commission."

The ICWhatever did not disappoint Luke's expectations that they would disappoint.

"They're taking it under advisement, and appreciate the eagerness Hogwarts students have shown to improve the game of quidditch," Luke said. 

"So, no, then," Mark said.

"I think that's actually bureaucrat for 'ha ha, hell no, and also, I think you're an idiot,' but yeah." Luke shrugged, folded the letter into a paper airplane, and tossed it down the length of the table.

Professor Shelly returned that day and picked up her lessons right where they had left off, as though nothing had happened. Luke went to her office after classes to ask her about Violet.

"I can't really tell you anything," Professor Shelly told him as she pulled out her wand and started casting spells. Not that she did so with any audible incantations; Luke could feel the air crackling with magic, but not one word escaped the professor's lips. "Except," she went on, "that Violet is safe. She is in the care of friends of her father, who trained him to manage and then to use his own abilities. She is learning to keep from starting fires when she does not want them, and until she learns to use them, that will be all the time. She will be away through the Christmas break, I am afraid. You will see her soon enough, though." Professor Shelly gave him a little smile. "I'll pass along your concern, though." She waved her wand, and the slightly oppressive feeling of air thick with wards went away. "Now, I'm told that you staged a protest in my absence. You've joined the ranks of the snitch-objectors, then?"

"No, Ma'am," Luke said. "I've joined the ranks of the people who think the snitch ought to be brought down to fifty points. If they didn't exist before, then I guess I've started them."

"Ah," Professor Shelly said. "You know, I was a chaser in my time at Hogwarts. Almost joined a professional team, and I was on the team at my college. I quite agree with you, of course. You met Doctor Weasley, of course. She was a bit of an activist in her school days. I have something in my desk somewhere that you might find interesting." She opened up a drawer in her desk and rooted around in it for a few moments, frowned, and opened it further, a couple of times, until it was open much further than the desk had room to contain drawers. Luke could see over the desk into the end of the drawer. A wand that had been snapped in half, a notebook with the words "To S, Love P" written on the cover, and a chocolate frog box sat in the drawer.

"Aha!" Professor Shelly cried, startling Luke, and she sat up and pushed the drawer shut with a single mighty thrust, then dropped a small, round object onto the desk. "There it is." Luke reached out and picked up the thing that Professor Shelly had put onto the desk as she went on, "Never really got off the ground, you know, but then, she's in a position to really do something about it now. It was a really good try. A really, really good try. Cost me two sickles, but hey, I could afford it."

Luke stared at the object in his hand. It was a round button, like the kind you might find a smiley face or a witty saying on. Printed across it were the letters S.P.E.W..

"Spew?" Luke said.

"The Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare," Professor Shelly said. "You could make up your own buttons. You might not want to sell them, though. It would be easier to give them away, and more people would wear them."

"Um," Luke said. "Did she know how terrible an acronym that was?"

"You know," Professor Shelly said, "I'm honestly not sure. How funny it was was only about half the reason I bought it, though."

Luke nodded. "Right," he said. "Um, Professor Shelly? I'm sorry, I didn't mean to see it, but I sort of couldn't help it. Why do you have a wand in your desk that was snapped in half?"

"Oh, that." Professor Shelly smiled. "I'm a muggle-born. That was snapped by the ministry during the second wizarding war. It's ridiculous, I know, but, well, there you are. I came back to England to get away from crazy policies in the U.S., and look what I stepped into."

"You were an American?"

"For five years," Professor Shelly said. "My parents did their research, and they heard about a school in America called the Rainpath Institute. Very nice place, and anyone who so much as used the word 'mudblood' was suspended for a week. We packed up and moved a week after I got my Hogwarts letter, and I was in Rainpath for five years, but they draft wizards and witches into government work in America, so for my sixth year my parents brought me to Hogwarts, and that's how I ended up in Hufflepuff. I was the oldest student to enroll in ninety-two years. Of course, then there was that awful fight in the halls, and Headmaster Dumbledore was killed, and all sorts of terrible things went on. I was in the Ministry when Potter and his friends staged their muggle-born breakout, and it was wonderful. I felt like I'd been given a second chance at life. Of course, I took the pieces of my wand back, because I had the chance. Got to fight in the Battle of Hogwarts with a wand that I took off one of the younger Death Eaters. Punched him in the face to get it, and he deserved it, too, the little bastard. He'd called me all sorts of things in my sixth year." Professor Shelly grinned at the memory. Suddenly Luke understood a little better about why she was teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts.

"Oh," he said. "Well, thanks, I guess. I'll see if I can come up with a button design." He dropped the button onto the desk and turned to head out the door. "So you're not asking me about the notebook?"

Luke blushed. "I don't really think that's any of my business," he said. He had been thinking about it, but he figured that probably wasn't within his rights to know. 

"Well, that's very considerate of you, but if you saw the wand, you obviously saw the notebook. Do you know Pam Patil, in Ravenclaw? Well, her aunt Parvati gave that to me. I was flattered, and I let her know that I'd treasure it forever, but, well, I was dating Terry Boot at the time. I told her I'd treasure it forever, though, and--"

"So how does Violet know about Mark?" Luke said.

Professor Shelly grinned. "You know, sometimes I wonder about you, but then you do something so Slytherin, like figuring things like that out, and I think, yeah, he's in the right house. As for how she knows, she's Marissa's best friend, and Marissa talked to her, because she really felt like she needed to talk to someone, and Violet decided to confide in me. Well. I suppose you're going to be mad at both of them now?"

Luke thought about it for a moment. "No," he said. "I mean, I could be, but what's the point? I did sort of dump a huge load of my problems on Marissa when I told her about it."

Professor Shelly shrugged. "Well, if you ever want to talk about it, just come and talk to me." She looked pensive for a moment, then opened up the drawer again, took out the chocolate frog, and tossed it to Luke. "Enjoy," she said. "Sorry I butted in. Are you ready for Deuling Club?"

Luke nodded. He hadn't realized it was that late. Professor Shelly led him down to the Great Hall, and Luke was a bit surprised to find Mark there, chatting with Teddy. 

"Mark," he said. "What on earth are you doing here?"

"Teddy said he got bored last time without Violet to challenge him, so he's making me come to meetings until she gets back."

Luke thought that over for a moment. It sounded genuine enough, and Violet was the one who was prone to complex schemes, not Professor Shelly, but still... "Oh," he said. He pulled the chocolate frog Professor Shelly had given him open a tiny bit, jammed his wand inside, turned off the charm on the candy, and opened the box all the way. He handed the frog to Mark and pulled out the card. Another Merlin.

Luke shrugged and pocketed the card. "Professor Shelly says Violet's going to be away over Christmas. You're going to be at a lot of these meetings, Mark. You might even start enjoying them."

"They're fun to watch," Mark admitted as Professor Shelly started talking about using potions during duels.

"Well," Luke said, "you're going to have to duel me, too. I usually duel Marissa, but I want to duel you as well. You're the only one I've never dueled."

Mark, it turned out, was an absolutely hopeless duelist. He couldn't cast a strong enough rebondi shield to throw a spell back at Luke, and he only managed to successfully cast a stunner three times over the course of the entire meeting. Luke actually found Mark's lack of talent to be sort of endearing (although he didn't quite want to admit that to himself) in a helpless little puppy dog way.

The four friends went back to their common rooms after the meeting thinking of Violet. It wasn't quite the same without her.

\-----------------------

Luke wasn't obligated to play in any more quidditch games before Christmas break. Ravenclaw, Gryffindor, and Hufflepuff were beating on each other until the eleventh of December, and Slytherin had had the first two games of the year, so there wasn’t really a rush. Ravenclaw seemed to be much more competent against teams other than Slytherin, as did Gryffindor, which cemented in Luke's mind the idea that the other teams just so happened to be utterly awful. In fact, Hufflepuff seemed to be a pretty good team relative to the other two, but they weren't the top of the heap by any means. Aside from a rather exciting game that was actually decided by the snitch in a logical, well-ordered, non-stupid way, nothing really interesting happened in quidditch, unless you counted Luke's distributing the buttons for his cause, little white buttons with a snitch on them that said "I'm worth less than you think." He had had some help in enchanting them from one of the fourth year Hufflepuffs who was in favor of his cause, and so they also flickered to say "Make me worth fifty." The buttons were an unexpected hit, and he actually found himself charging ten knuts apiece simply because his Hufflepuff helper was going to so much effort to make them. Sales were less robust than giveaways had been, but Luke's efforts were helping in other ways, too. The students in his little movement didn't seem to be afraid of him at all. They greeted him in the hallway, and smiled at him in classes if they were in the same year as he was. Luke was beginning to feel normal, which was something of a novelty.

In fact, it looked like the lead up to Christmas break was actually going to be dull until the nineteenth, when he made the mistake of sleeping in. It was a Sunday, so he thought he could get away with it, but it turned out that he needed an alibi.

Luke skipped breakfast, opting instead to stay in bed, and he actually managed to fall asleep again (although that might have been a sort of small, secondary mistake, since he dreamed about Mark, and that always left him a little off-balance lately). But when he came out to the common room, everyone turned to look at him immediately. Marissa, especially, didn't look happy.

"Um," Luke said, "Did I miss something?"

"Nice try," Marissa said, and then she stormed out of the common room, actually managing to make the door slam shut behind her, which was an impressive feat since it opened and closed on its own.

He stared after her for a moment. "All right, what does she think I did?"

"You know, Luke," Phineas said. "Don't pretend that you don't."

Luke glared at him. Obviously there would be no arguing with him. He opened his mouth to reply, and then it occurred to him that he had just been dreaming about Mark, and that sometimes, only once in a while, but sometimes, he talked in his sleep, and that dream had had a few moments where if Marissa had found out about it, the things he said might not make her too happy, and dammit, why did this sort of thing always have to happen to him, it just wasn't fair. He felt a blush creeping up his face and said, "Humor me, okay? Let's pretend that I was, you know, asleep for the time that I was sleeping in there. Because I was asleep. So it's not pretending."

"Yeah," Phineas said. All right, we'll pretend. You went after Cameron Winder. Caught him in the third-floor corridor and put him in a full body-bind curse, then put the fear of God into him. Well, no, it was the fear of you. The fear of God wouldn't have made him wet his pants. I don't think he'll be stealing any more of our victories."

"What!?" Luke exclaimed. "I didn't do that! I just told you, I was... Oh for god's sake, you're not going to believe me. Do you know what I supposedly said to him?"

"You told him to watch his step on the pitch, and not to breathe a word to the teachers. Of course, he's so scared now that he's not telling anyone, but everyone saw him running to change his clothes, and Parker saw you at it. Personally, I think that deserves a round of applause, Winder's a stuck-up little twit anyways, ought to be named Windbag."

Phineas started clapping, and then the rest of the Slytherins started clapping, because of course they would, they were the people who still wanted to be Slytherins even after the whole Voldemort thing, they probably thought that this thing, which Luke most patently hadn't done, meant that he was turning Voldemorty again, and that was a bad thing.

He ran out of the common room. The door barely managed to jump aside as he got to it, and he found Marissa only by luck when he passed a girls' bathroom and heard crying coming from within. He opened the door and walked in. He could lose house points for this, but this was important enough to lose house points over, and besides, he wasn't feeling too charitable to the rest of the Slytherins right now anyways. 

"Marissa," he said.

"Go away!" she shrieked. 

"Marissa," Luke said, "I didn't do it! I would never do anything like that."

"Yes you would," Marissa said, and now her voice was tinged with fear. "You must've been seething for a month. You're not the same person when you're angry, and if that's going to happen anytime you get angry, I don't want to have anything to do with you! Get out, or I'll call for a teacher."

"Marissa," Luke said. Marissa, please. I--"

"Professor Gills!" Marissa screamed, and Luke sighed and turned to leave. He was only a little ways off when Professor Gills came barreling past him.

They couldn't prove that Luke had done anything. Winder was too terrified to talk about it, and without his testimony, the teachers couldn't touch Luke, but it was enough to convict him in the eyes of most of the school. Teddy and Mark believed him, at least, and for what it was worth, so did Professor Longbottom, Professor Shelly and Professor Leiman, whose classes were therefore likely to still be tolerable, but Marissa absolutely refused to so much as talk to him. She took to sitting with the Gryffindors at lunch, and Luke really wanted to cry over that. He didn't, but he still wanted to.

The next day, on the train ride away for the Christmas break, Teddy volunteered to go keep Marissa company, and Luke and Mark wound up alone in a compartment, and pretty much the instant the door closed on Teddy, Luke finally started crying. 

"Luke," Mark cried, and he jumped up and hurried over to Luke's side.

"I was just getting them to stop being afraid of me," Luke said through his tears. "and then this happened, and now they all think I'm going to snap at any moment! Why, Mark? Who did this, and why did they do it?"

Mark wrapped his arms around Luke and held him in a tight hug. "I don't know," he said. "But if I ever find them, they're gonna pay for it." Luke sniffled into Mark's shoulder, and Mark squeezed him a little tighter, burying his face in Luke's hair. "Nobody should have to go through the sort of.. the sort of crap they're putting you through, and they're going to pay for it," he whispered.

Luke couldn't help cracking a sad little smile at that. How the little Hufflepuff who couldn't even make himself known in a duel thought he was going to intimidate, let alone punish, someone with powerful enough magic to impersonate Luke and go after Winder at the same time was a mystery to be solved later. Right now, what Luke knew was that Mark was doing his Hufflepuff Loyalty thing, and it was very sweet, and he was holding onto Luke very tightly, and he seemed like the best thing in the world right at that moment.  
Luke slipped out of Mark's arms and stared at him for a moment, wiping the tears from his eyes. "Thanks," he said. 

Mark smiled a thin, flimsy little smile and said, "I mean it. I really will make them pay for it. They'll pay out the nose."

And Luke kissed him. 

Mark let out a strangled little noise of surprise and then his brain seemed to catch up with what was happening and he started kissing back. Luke wrapped him up in a whole new hug and they slid closer together on the seat, still joined at the lips. 

Mark reached over behind Luke and pulled the window shade in the compartment door's window closed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The messed up thing is that this chapter isn't why I've tagged this thing as "I am mean to my characters"


	4. You did WHAT!?

By the time the train pulled into King's cross Station, they were a lot less stuck together at the lips, although they had curled up together on the seat. Luke reflected, very privately, that one good snogging session was apparently marvelous therapy. 

"So," Mark said as the train pulled to a stop and Luke began disentangling himself, "Does that make us.. you know.. boyfriends?"

Luke sighed, pulled his trunk down from the rack overhead. "I don't know," he said. "I mean, we've been over this whole.. bag of poorly directed hormones thing. I feel like I'd like nothing better right now, but that might just be because you just made me feel a lot better. It definitely doesn't hurt your case any, but... I just don't know. I know it's really crappy of me to go snogging you and then say that I don't know, but... I don't know."

"That's all right," Mark said. "I mean, you're not exactly in the best of places right now. Go home, sort things out. Have some eggnog, and I'll see you on the twenty-third, all right?"

Luke nodded and lifted up his trunk. "Yeah. Thanks for understanding, Mark. You're wonderful."

Mark smiled, but he didn't say anything, just watched Luke go.

Luke met Teddy and Marissa on the way out of the train. Marissa turned her nose up at him the instant she saw him and walked away in the opposite direction. Teddy let out a little sigh.

"I'm sorry, mate. I tried talking to her, but she wouldn't even listen." He peered quizzically at Luke's face. "Have you been crying?"

Luke nodded. "Off and on. Mark... uh... Mark helped me out through that, though. I think I'm all right."

"Right," Teddy said. "Well, here." He lifted up his wand and pointed it at Luke's face and said "Poudrum," and Luke felt the dried remains of his last crying jag vanish, and he thanked Teddy and started to turn and head out of the train, but Teddy said, "Where is Mark, anyways?"

Luke looked up, tried very hard to push down a blush, and said, "I'm not sure. He's probably just pulling a book out of his trunk or something. You know Mark."

Teddy nodded, and they headed off of the train, and Teddy's grandmother (along with Harry Potter, to Luke's displeasure) was standing on the platform. Teddy ran to them, and Potter stepped forwards, and Luke thought, _oh, hell, I'm screwed._

Sure enough, Potter was walking straight towards Luke, and he stopped in front of him and said, "Hello, Luke."

"Mister Potter," Luke said. "I'm in the middle of a public space. I'd just like to remind you of that."

Potter flinched at that. "All right," he said, "I deserve that. But... well, I'm not going to do anything to you. Unless. Well. I'm sure you know I've heard the rumors about what you did. You said you didn't do it. Would you mind if I... if I checked for myself? I mean, right now, nobody will believe me either way, but--"

"Go ahead," Luke said. 

Potter raised an eyebrow and knelt down in front of Luke. He locked eyes with him and said "Legilimens," and Luke found himself remembering the day before, the morning, the dream... oh dear.

"Oh dear," Potter said. "I'm... terribly sorry, I didn't mean to see that."

"It's okay, sir," Luke said. "You know that I was asleep."

"Yes," Potter said. "I know. Thanks for letting me check. I know you haven't got any reason to trust me."

"I really don't," Luke said, and he was about to say more, but there was a loud shout from somewhere behind Potter right at that moment.

"Get away from my son, you awful, awful man!"

Potter stood up and whirled, his wand out (and where had his wand been that he could draw it that quickly, Luke wondered) and leveled at Anna Lee Restimen before he processed that the shout was directed at him. Even as he lowered his wand, Luke's mother let out a little squeak of fear.

Potter turned and walked away, and Anna Lee ran over to Luke and pulled him into a tight embrace.

"He didn't do anything to you, did he?" Anna Lee said.

Luke shook his head. "He was just double-checking to make sure of something. Mum, something's happened at Hogwarts, something bad, and I was just getting people to like me, and now they think I'm evil again." As Luke spoke, he started crying again, and he couldn't help but feel sorry about wasting Teddy's spell. 

Luke explained on the way home, and his mother listened attentively the whole time, and then she said "Well, wasn't there a potion mentioned in one of your books that can make someone look like someone else? Polymath or something?"

Luke stared at her for a moment. He had let her read over his potions textbook over the summer because she had been curious, and now he was remembering that yes, his mother was actually quite bright, even if she did still think that blood pops couldn't possibly be blood flavored.

"I'll look for it when we get home," he said, "But that would explain a lot."

\--------------------------

By the time the twenty -third rolled around, Luke had found the reference in The Potionmaker's Pal, a lengthy passage about the dangers (and potential usages) of Polyjuice Potion, which seemed to be a very difficult brew to mix. He sent a letter off to Professor Leiman about it, and was told that the fifth years were being taught to make Polyjuice in their Defense Against the Dark Arts class. That narrowed the list of suspects to about a seventh of the students at the school.

Luke could, theoretically, have checked them all, but he wanted to catch his imposter red-handed, if he could.

He decided to take his potions book with him when he went to Teddy's house for his get-together with his friends. Mark's parents arrived with Mark around two to take Luke and his mother to the Tonks household. Linda, Mark's Mother, and Rutherford, his father, shook Anna Lee’s hand in turn, and the small talk began. 

"You know," Linda was saying as Luke emerged from his bedroom fully dressed and ready to go, "I had my doubts about Luke when I first heard about the whole You-Know-Who business, but I think Mark must be right. He's really just fine."

"We don't say You-Know-Who in this house, Missus Jonson," Luke said. "That's a name that shows fear of someone who's dead. We say Voldemort. Or Tom Riddle."

"Oh," Linda exclaimed as she saw Luke. "Well, are you ready to go then?" Luke nodded in approval. He noted that, for all that she used the euphemisms common to her generation, she didn't flinch at the name, and neither did her husband. He walked up to Mark and gave him a warm hug. 

"It's good to see you, Mark," Luke said. Mark flushed brightly and took his mother's hand, and Luke took her other hand, and Rutherford offered his hand to Anna lee, and Luke said, "Don't panic, Mum. It'll be really uncomfortable for a minute, but you'll be just fine."

"Right," Anna Lee said, and then they apparated. Luke was squeezed through a letterbox and came out on the other side in a spacious living room with tasteful decorations. Pictures of a middle-aged wizard smiled down from the wall and waved at the new arrivals, and Andromeda Tonks was bustling into the room even as they arrived. 

"Ah, good," she said. "Not a minute late, quite nice. Hello, Luke, hello, Mark. Teddy is upstairs in his bedroom."

Luke and Mark exchanged one of those oh-good-we-can-get-away-from-the-adults looks common to adolescents and children and the wiser sort of adults and they headed off up the stairs. 

"I've found something interesting that I think you and Teddy ought to see," Luke said as soon as they were out of earshot of the already-happily-chatting adults. "It was in my potions book. I think it might explain why Winder was so convinced I was the one who attacked him."

"Really?" Mark said. "You think you've cracked it already?"

Luke shrugged. "There's got to be a dozen other ways to do it. Illusion spells, transfigurations, memory charms... but none of them seems as likely." He pushed open the door to Teddy's room and stepped inside. Teddy's room was large, about the size of Luke's living room. Posters of the Chudley Cannons covered one wall in bright, bright orange, and the other three walls were plastered with vintage poster of the Weird Sisters and other wizarding bands (mostly all-girls), and posters for plays. Teddy's white owl hooted a  
greeting from his perch on top of Teddy's headboard. Teddy himself was on the bed, obviously relaxed, because his hair was its natural reddish color. He was reading a book with a moving picture on the cover. The book proudly proclaimed, in huge, flowing letters, that it had been written by someone named Arabella Figg. What the book was called, Luke couldn't see in the instant before Teddy saw them and snapped the book shut, his hair going red and green as he ran over to them. He opened his mouth to speak, but Luke pulled his potions book out of his pocket and handed it over. "Page two-hundred and three."

Teddy opened up the book and turned the pages, and he read through, quickly and silently and in less than a minute, and Luke was forcefully reminded that, yes, Teddy was a Ravenclaw. "Polyjuice is really hard to make," Teddy pointed out.

"The fifth years are learning it in Defense, though," Luke said. "It's part of Professor Shelly's course on defensive potionmaking. She's doing Polyjuice, Felix Felicis, Wolfsbane, Potencia Poten, and Stoneskin Draught."

Teddy stared at Luke. "She's teaching fifth year Slytherins and Gryffindors to brew Polyjuice and strength-boosting potion? Is it too late to ask for a transfer to Durmstrang?"

"Durmstrang nothing," Luke said. "I'm going to find out which one of the fifth years is taking Polyjuice to impersonate me and go around intimidating seekers."

Teddy's eyes got really wide as the pieces clicked into place. "You think--"

"I know someone is framing me, god knows why, and I'm going to catch them."

Teddy mulled over that for a minute and replied, "All right. Count me in."

They started talking over plans, and came up with nothing. Whoever had actually committed the crime had accomplished a perfect misdeed. They would wait for their next opportunity. Luke effectively had to be seen with other people at all times in order to avoid being framed again. By the third go at the problem, they were all getting a hopeless feeling.

"For the last time," Teddy said, "It takes a month to brew, and we can't brew it, it's incredibly hard. Luke's the best potionmaker we've got, and he probably can't do it."

"I probably can, too," Luke said. "I'm a better potionmaker than some of the fifth years, and they're doing all right."

"And where would we do it?" Teddy went on as though Luke hadn't spoken. "In Moaning Myrtle's bathroom or something? It's ridiculous, we'd be caught, and then they'd be on to us like that." He snapped his fingers. 

Privately, Luke thought that there probably were places you could brew Polyjuice without being caught, but he didn't know of any, and he was willing to bet that the others didn't, either.

"Maybe somebody has some already brewed they could give us," Mark said.

Teddy rolled his eyes. "Yeah, right. 'Professor Shelly, my friends and I were just wondering if you could spare a cup of Polyjuice for us. We need it to use in some way we haven't quite figured out to spy on other students. Also, we need to get a lock of hair from every student in the fifth year, just to be sure.' That'll go over swimmingly."

"Professor Leiman," Luke said. "Not Professor Shelly. If anyone in the entire school has a stock of unused Polyjuice just sitting around, it's Professor Leiman. Mark, you're brilliant."

"We still need a plan," Mark said.

"We'll come up with one," Luke said. "But right now, I can smell dinner getting about ready, and I'm starved. Come on, let's go."

Teddy jumped up and headed out the door right away, and Luke picked up his book and stowed it back in his pocket, then went to follow Teddy, and Mark said, "Have you thought about it any more?"

Luke turned around. Mark was bright red, looking at his shoes as though they were the most fascinating thing in the world. "Thought abou... Well, of course I have, Mark. I've been thinking about it a lot, but... Look, I know it's hard for you to think about it this way, but this is sort of a big deal to me. Being... you know, being gay... it's not a little thing that muggles don't care about, it's a big, huge, issue, and I can't just... I mean... All right, so obviously I like you. I mean, really, really like you, but.. I can't just make myself say yes. I've got to think about it, and I might spend a really long time thinking. I'm really sorry about that."

Mark nodded, but he didn't actually say anything. He just walked out of the room and left Luke wondering if he was going to ruin his relationship with Mark next.

He sighed and walked out of the room, and found Mark waiting for him in the hallway. "Look," Mark said, "I'm sorry, I know this is really hard for you. I'm trying not to push you, but... Well, Dad says I need to learn impulse control. Mum says I'm just really forthright, but that's Mum."

Luke smiled and pulled Mark into a tight embrace. They headed down to dinner together. 

The meal itself was delicious. Andromeda Tonks was an incredibly good cook, and put out a beautiful spread as well as a tasty one. The presentation was better than at Hogwarts by far, where "formal dining" consisted of anything with serving platters. Her table was decorated with moving pictures of snowflakes that drifted down to the edges and slowly built up a layer of snow. About halfway through dinner, a little picture of a snowball went sailing across the cloth to Luke and poofed against his snowdrift. He looked up and saw Teddy grinning mischievously at him, and suddenly it was a game. Luke found that he could roll little pictures of snowballs with his fingers. The snow on the table actually felt cold to the touch, and was easy enough to "throw" across the table. Before long, Luke, Mark, Teddy, Mister Jonson, and, to Luke's surprise, Andromeda, had a lively little snowball fight going. They worked through the meal while they tossed the snowballs at each other, and when everyone protested that they were totally stuffed, they couldn't possibly eat another bite, Andromeda finally stood up and said, "All right, let's go to the den, then."

They all got up and went to a room decorated in warm, rich chocolate browns and cheery wallpaper with frolicking animals on it. The animals literally frolicked. Teddy's grandmother clearly liked her moving pictures. Luke reflected that television would probably blow her little wizarding mind. In one corner of the room was a big, bushy Christmas tree, covered in lights and big, glowing ornaments and what looked like actual live fairies, and tinsel and strings of popcorn, and something that might have been little bags of sweets, and topped with a big, glowing thing that was definitely a fairy. Spread out underneath it were scores of presents, one of which had airholes and was shaking occasionally. Luke saw that that one was labeled with his mother's name. Facing the tree were a few couches and big armchairs almost as squashy and in much better condition than the ones in the Slytherin common room (although there were stains on a couple of them), and a fire was going cheerfully in the fireplace.

Luke had liked this room from the first time he saw it, near the beginning of the summer, and he was quite pleased to see that this was where Teddy got to spend his Christmases. 

"Teddy," Missus Tonks said, "Be a dear and turn on the radio, would you? I think that band you like must be playing some Christmas song or other right now, they always are."

Teddy ran over to a radio sitting on a little table in the corner and turned it on, and said, "Yep, that's them."

Carol of the Bells was coming from the speakers, and it was unmistakably being performed by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. "But they're a muggle band," Luke said.

"So," Teddy said. "I can like muggle bands. Uncle Ron's dad told me about this band. He said they're called the Transportational Orchestra."

"Trans-Siberian," Luke and Anna Lee corrected simultaneously.

Mark went and sat down in one of the big squashy chairs, and Luke walked over and squeezed in next to him. You could have fit a whole other kid in with them, and for a moment, Luke thought Teddy was going to join them, until Andromeda waved her wand at Teddy and a santa hat, complete with silly white puffball at the top, appeared on his head. "Pass out the presents," she said. "Start with Missus Restimen's, please."

Teddy walked over the the pile of presents under the tree and picked up the box with the airholes, walking it over to Anna Lee. It rattled around as he walked, and whatever was inside of it scrabbled at the sides. Anna Lee took the box and opened it up and pulled out a little black and brown kitten and immediately began making little cooing noises. Luke had to admit that it was absolutely adorable. "Oh, Thank you, Andromeda. How did you know?"

"You mentioned it a few weeks ago," Andromeda said. "He's part-kneazle, so he's very intelligent."

"Well," Anna Lee said, "I absolutely love him, he's just adorable!" She held the kitten up to her nose and cooed, "Aren't you, whisker-face?" The kitten mewled and everyone laughed.

Teddy kept handing out presents. A set of books on experimental transfiguration for Mister Jonson, a new hat for Missus Jonson, a jigsaw puzzle for Andromeda, and so on and so on. By the time Teddy had given away all but three of the gifts, and those all labelled for him, Luke had a new Stephen King book, and a pair of omnioculars (from Teddy, who had winked when he gave to to him), and a complete set of The Order of the Phoenix chocolate frog cards, for which he had very nearly kissed Mark, because he knew how important collecting those had been to him.

Mark got omnioculars and a wink from Teddy as well, and a book on shield spells, and a pocket sneakoscope from Luke, and the grown-ups started talking, and it seemed like it was going to be really boring, but then they started talking about which house they'd been in in school and suddenly Luke was a lot more interested. "I was in Slytherin, of course," Andromeda said, responding to something Rutherford had said about blood purists. "Pretty much my entire family has always been Slytherins, except for my cousin Sirius. But then I married Ted, and he was a Hufflepuff, and my daughter was a Hufflepuff too, and you know, they were never blood purists. Well, I should think Ted wouldn't have been, he was a muggle-born himself. But it's not as though it's only blood purists that go into Slytherin, either. Or at least, it wasn't. Nowadays, with Slytherin being such a small house, a lot of them are blood purists, maybe even all of them besides Luke and that Jones girl. It's a damn shame, because it was really a decent house before, for all its faults."

"Hm," Rutherford said. "Well, you know, I was a Gryffindor, and Linda here was a Ravenclaw. Everyone said that I shouldn't marry her, because she was a Ravenclaw, and Gryffindor/Ravenclaw marriages almost never work out, but here we are."

"I wonder why that is," Luke said. "The whole Gryffindor/Ravenclaw marriages thing, I mean. You'd think it would be Gryffindor/Slytherin that doesn't work, but you hear about those succeeding all the time. And Hufflepuff/Slytherin isn't supposed to work too well either, actually." He glanced over at Mark and added, "I'd not bother looking for a Hufflepuff girl myself if I weren't so convinced that I should be in Hufflepuff or Gryffindor instead of Slytherin. The hat was just a little too proud of itself, I think."

Andromeda smiled. "I've thought about that. You know what I think? I think that people are wrong about Gryffindor and Slytherin being opposites, and Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw. Think about it. Gryffindor and Slytherin were best friends when they founded the school and so were Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw. Both pairs valued very similar things, but each had their opposite philosophy represented. A true Gryffindor will rush into a situation and start acting right away, and a Ravenclaw will do just the opposite, trying to think through everything they might have to do. And the same sort of thing is true of Slytherins and Hufflepuffs. Slytherins are all about ambition and cunning, and Hufflepuffs are very straightforward, and they're loyal. If Hufflepuffs were more willing to stand up for themselves, it would be Hufflepuff and Slytherin that are at each other's throats all the time, but they're not. The Gryffindors get their hero... thing going and then they stand up for the Hufflepuffs, so it looks like Gryffindor and Slytherin are the ones that hated each other from the start, and they're not."

Luke grinned and marked down Andromeda Tonks on his list of people who were clearly smart enough to figure the world out.

"That's brilliant," he said. "I've never thought of it that way, but it's really good."

"I've had sixty years to figure it out," Andromeda said. "I should hope it's a bit more developed than a second-year's theories."

Luke laughed. Andromeda was always teasing like that. From almost anyone else, that comment would have offended him, but he knew she didn't consider him a child any more than she considered him to be the reincarnation of Voldemort.

After that, the conversation wound down to things Luke was less interested in, and he and Mark followed Teddy up to his bedroom once Teddy had finished unwrapping his three books.

"So you don't really think it couldn't work out between us?" Mark whispered as they followed Teddy back up to his bedroom. 

"Of course I don't think that," Luke whispered back. "Your parents are from houses that aren't supposed to work well together, and look at them. That's not why I'm... you know. Hesitating."

"Oi," Teddy said. "Stop gossiping and catch up."

When they got to Teddy's room, he grinned and said, "Pull out your omnioculars."

They pulled out their omnioculars, and Teddy let out something that was dangerously close to a giggle. "Now say 'show me,'" he said. 

Luke and Mark both chimed "Show me" and held the omnioculars up to their faces, looking around the room. Nothing looked all that different, until Luke ran his gaze over Teddy, stopped, and stared for a moment. Then he grinned. "Nice undies, Teddy. Does your grandma know what these can do?"

As Luke lowered his omnioculars, he saw out of the corner of his eye Mark's head whipping around to stare at Teddy. Mark started laughing. 

"Of course she doesn't," Teddy said. "And neither do the girls, so don't say a word to them."

"Where did you get these?" Mark asked. 

"Weasley's Wizard Wheezes," Teddy said. "They were on sale, so I got a pair for each of us. I figured that they'd be pretty funny to have around. And, really, we can only like them more as time goes on, right?"

"You're a terrible person," Luke said.

Mark giggled next to him. "You've got a stain on your underpants, Luke."

"Stop that," Luke said.

\----------------------

Luke packed the omnioculars when he went back to school. His mother had named the kitten Fortinbras, after a dog in her favorite book which she was constantly pestering Luke to read, and she took him with them on the drive to the platform, carrying the kitten held against her shoulder when she walked into the station with Luke. Of course, when they arrived on the platform itself, pretty much every girl below her third year went running up to have a look at the kitten, who, by virtue of being tiny and cute, briefly exceeded Luke's fame and overpowered any fear the girls might have had of him.

Teddy and Mark were talking with Marissa in a little group off to one side, but when Marissa saw him, unlike most of the girls, she didn’t come running up, cooing and saying nothing intelligible besides "kitty". Rather the opposite; she turned tail and walked quickly away. Luke sighed as he walked up to Mark and Teddy. "So she still isn't talking to me?"

"Not a word," Teddy said. "She still thinks you went after Winder. Why should she?"

"Actually," Mark put in, "That's most of what she was talking about with us. You know, 'how can you still be friends with him, don't you know he's lying?' That sort of thing."

"And you know what's really awful?" Teddy said. "When we prove that you're not the one who did it, she'll come right back and apologize again. I'm telling you, mate, she's just no good. I mean, okay, last year was reasonable. I freaked out for a little while before we found out that you weren't dangerous, but this... she knows you're not some sort of evil  
mastermind. This just means she doesn't trust you."

Luke couldn't help but agree. Marissa might be a friend again when she decided Luke was innocent, but it just wouldn't be the same.

They boarded the train together. This time, Teddy shared their compartment with them, and they played Scrabble all the way to the castle.

\---------------------

Luke fully expected someone else to get attacked by his imposter on the first day back, and, unfortunately, he wasn't disappointed. He slept in to see if it would happen again, and it did. The victim this time was the Ravenclaw seeker and rather than just being intimidated, she had one of Luke's buttons stuck to her nose with a permanent sticking charm, and had to go to the infirmary to get it off. Since the attacks were clearly escalating, and he couldn't rely on the victims to keep being too scared to point the finger at him for the teachers if worse things started happening, Luke decided that he would simply have to not sleep in anymore, which was a little difficult since he liked to stay up late reading a book most nights. He didn't catch on to the trick of waking up early to do his reading for nearly a week, and when he did, it was hard to get it right, because switching over was exhausting. 

Still, it wasn't all bad. Violet returned on the seventeenth, stepping into the Great Hall during breakfast and running over towards her friends. She stopped short as Teddy jumped up from his seat, ran to her, and wrapped her up in a huge, fierce hug, with a quick but unmistakable peck on the lips. Luke couldn't exactly blame him (although he could certainly make fun of him). He had very nearly done something similar, and he suspected Mark had had to push down the impulse, too. That was the sort of thing that happened when you were last seen with severe injuries. Actually, Luke was a little surprised Teddy's greeting was as subdued as it was. With as many letters as Teddy had refused to share, he had been sure Teddy had a pre-set appointment to drag Violet off for a good, long snog somewhere, but then, he might have been projecting his own desires onto others. After all, a part of him had wanted very much to kick Teddy out of the compartment on the Hogwarts express. Teddy seemed to realize what he had done about two seconds after he did it, because his face lit up, bright red, and he almost--almost--turned and ran back to his seat. It was pretty funny; Luke could actually see the moment that Teddy decided not to flee from Violet's presence, and instead took her by the hand and led her, both of them blushing furiously by now, to the table. Teddy sat down heavily, and then leaned over to Luke and said, "Don't look to see, but the next time you look up there, tell me if Professor Leiman and Professor Shelly are looking at me, okay?"

Luke nodded, and pulled back a glance at the staff table. He hadn't even thought about it, but Teddy had just run up and kissed Violet in front of her mother and her grandfather. If Luke knew Professor Leiman even half as well as he thought he did, he was sure that Professor Leiman would be amused, and possibly even pleased, but Professor Shelly might be less than amused. 

Eventually, Luke did happen to look up at the staff table, but if Professor Leiman and Professor Shelly had been looking that way, they had stopped by then, and were deep in conversation, which was probably about Violet and Teddy, but might just as well have been about almost anything in the world, because they were always talking about something at breakfast.

"So," Violet said after Luke reported on Professor Shelly and Professor Leiman, "Where's Marissa, then? Or did I arrive just after she started spouting water from her ears and had to be taken away by her Uncle Phillip, who knows all about such things?"

Luke couldn't help cracking a smile at that image, or the inevitable images of similar disasters befalling Mark and Teddy, involving large piles of sand, and tornadoes roaming the halls of Hogwarts, looking for trailer parks to demolish. 

"She's abandoned us," Teddy explained.

"Someone's been framing Luke for attacking seekers after he started a group to work towards making the snitch worth fifty points instead of a hundred and fifty. Marissa believes he really did it, even though he told her he didn't."

"Oh," Violet said. "Bad luck, that. Still, it's not a total loss. You've got Mark, right?"

Teddy choked on his scrambled eggs, his whole face changing shape completely as he did, and his hair color flickering around the spectrum a bit, and Violet had to pat him on the back until he quit coughing up bits of egg. Luke felt as though he had probably turned a very pleasant shade of tomato red, and he could see the color creeping up towards spectacular levels in Mark. "Run that by me one more time," Teddy said. "Luke and Mark are--"

Violet clapped her hand over his mouth. "I shouldn't even have said that much." she said. "I'm really sorry, guys. I just thought that by now..." She trailed off into silence. 

"Well, we're not," Luke said. He grinned. "And I'm sorry to inform you that your efforts at clandestine manipulation were not subtle enough to escape the notice of a twelve-year-old boy."

She grinned. "I have barely got half a year on you, I can't be expected to be as subtle and hard-to-detect as, say, Harry Potter."

Teddy cast her a dirty look even as he laughed. After all, Potter's efforts at subtlety last year had gone over like a lead balloon.

"But, are you two... you know... a thing?" Teddy said. By now, there weren't scrambled eggs coming out of his mouth as he talked.

"Yes," Mark said.

"No," Luke said at the same time. He sighed. "I don't bloody know, all right? It's all... very... confusing."

Teddy looked back and forth between Luke and Mark for a moment. "So.. you've not discussed this?"

"A little bit," Luke said. "There was... why am I telling you this? Stop badgering me. You'll know it when Mark batters down my resistance."

"If you know he's going to batter down your resistance," Teddy said, "Why not just give in right away?"

"Because now isn't a good time," Luke said, "and also because maybe he won't batter down my resistance, I don't know. I'm still... you know... thinking it... Why are we still talking about this!? Didn't I just say I didn't want to talk about it? Why must everyone... no. you know what, I'm going to go eat the rest of my breakfast somewhere where you two can't speculate loudly in my ears. Mark, if you'd like to come with, you're welcome to." He got up to leave, and breakfast chose that moment to end, the sausages and scrambled eggs and orange juice vanishing from the table, and the plates with them, except for Violet's, which remained in front of her. Luke found himself looking down in disgust at his empty hands. Violet started giggling, and that set off Teddy, and they set off Mark, and pretty soon all four of them were laughing really, really hard, and everyone else in the Great Hall was looking over at them, wondering what was so funny.

Once they had recovered from their giggling fit, Luke and Violet went down the the dungeons for potions class practically arm in arm. It was great having her back. Luke hadn't realized how much he had missed her while she was gone, especially with her letters arriving so often, it seemed like she was there with them, almost. But it wasn't the same as having her there, to make smart comments or laugh at just the right time. Of all Luke's friends, Violet was probably the best socially, since Teddy was too Ravenclaw and Mark too Marklike (and Marissa, when she was being Luke's friend instead of believing the first rumor that came along, was too shy) to be social butterflies. Luke had never really been one for small talk, but he could certainly appreciate having it available, and Violet made it available.

"So," Luke said. "Is it just my imagination, or have you been romancing Teddy from afar?"

Violet shrugged. "I just... told him how much I missed him. How he chooses to interpret that is up to him. Not that I'm complaining if he's decided that he'd like to ask me out sometime." She looked thoughtful for a moment and then said, "Boy, puberty is hitting our bunch like a freight train, isn't it?"

"How do you mean?" Luke said.

"Well, look at us," Violet said. "First it was you and Marissa. Then it was you and Mark. Then it was me and Teddy. Next thing you know it's going to be me and Mark, or me and you, or Mark and Teddy, or you and Teddy, or Teddy and Marissa. If we're really careful, we might see all of them."

"You forgot Mark and Marissa and you and Marissa," Luke said.

Violet stepped into the dungeon with him and their conversation came to a halt. Professor Leiman was up at the head of the classroom already. He gave Violet a warm smile before he turned and sort of glared at the blackboard, and words started appearing on it as he lectured. After class, he called Violet aside, and Luke had to go all the way to his next class with Runel following on his heels and Marissa glaring daggers at him, something he had been hoping Violet's presence would help to reduce, if not eliminate. Runel was so convinced that Luke had turned over a new--or rather, a very old--leaf that he was making no secret of the fact that he wanted nothing more than to be the first of the new Death Eaters. Luke had to resist the urge to start hexing Runel pretty much twenty-four seven. 

Still, when he got to Charms class, he at least was sure that he'd get a table away from either of them, until he arrived and saw no Teddy, and realized that Teddy had Professor Shelly first thing, and there were a couple of really awkward moments while he waited for Teddy to show up, and then he finally did, and Luke practically ran to his side.

"Oh good," Teddy said as Professor Gills opened the door and they filed into the classroom. "I was starting to think I wouldn't arrive on time."

"So?" Luke prompted.

"Oh. Um, well, Professor Shelly pulled me aside after class, and told me that Violet was only thirteen, and that that probably meant she oughtn't to be allowed to date yet, because Professor Shelly remembered all the things that she did when she was thirteen." Teddy's face broke out into a huge grin, and he went on, "And then she told me that Violet was a responsible young lady, and I'm a respectable enough young man, certainly better than any of the boys Professor Shelly dated at that age, so if we wanted to make a go of it, we were to be allowed to. And then she said that if she ever caught me doing anything untoward with her daughter, she would make an angry dad with a shotgun look like a picnic."

"So all peace and love until that bit at the end," Luke said.

Teddy nodded. "Yeah. But watch out: that last step's a doozy."

\--------------------------

The next quidditch game of the year was Hufflepuff versus Slytherin, and anticipation began to build. The match would determine who was the front runner with Gryffindor for the quidditch cup, and if it was Slytherin, pretty much the entire school was prepared to have a contentious year. Of course, there was plenty of time to wait around for the anticipation to build to a crescendo of athletics-themed stupidity. Teddy and Violet managed to ignore it despite Violet's being on the Gryffindor quidditch team. It might have had something to do with the fact that, once given permission, they took every opportunity to be affectionate with each other. They were, at least, not one of those absurd young couples that snogs all the time. Violet was too sensible and Teddy too smart for either of them to insist upon it, although Luke got the feeling that if Violet had been less sensible, Teddy was also smart enough that he would have insisted.

Instead, they simply lounged on each other at every seating opportunity. It was ridiculous, as though they hadn't been able to figure out any effective way to announce to the world that they were dating, and had settled on informing the world that they had had an accident with a permanent sticking charm during a wrestling match. But when they weren't lounging while talking with Luke and Mark, they were generally elsewhere, elsewhere being anywhere they could find some privacy. This would have left Luke and Mark alone a lot too, but Luke was still making an effort not to be unseen. He and Mark spent any alone time in the Great Hall, playing chess.

February came on, and Valentine's with it. This year, Professor Shelly seemed to have learned the lesson that Valentine's day simply isn't celebrated at Hogwarts, and no paper hearts adorned her classroom. 

Luke found himself incredibly depressed. He dreamed of his attack on Runel of a year before, and woke up with the other boy's scream in his head. He went to the Great Hall for breakfast and found Mark sitting and Teddy and Violet lounging and announced, sullenly, "I am in a very dark mood right now. Someone please cheer me up."

"There's a charm for that," Mark said.

"He said cheer him up," Teddy commented from his spot in Violet's arms. "Not kill him with ill-performed magic."

"Shut up, Teddy," Luke, Mark, and Violet chimed at once, and Teddy decided that he was officially outvoted, probably by Violet more than the other two, and wisely shut up.

Mark grinned, and flushed to the scalp, said, "I know of another way I could cheer you--"

"No," Luke interrupted. He patted Mark on the shoulder as he sat down. "Thank you for the thought, though."

Mark, still bright red, made a sullen little noise and said, "I think I ought to get a chance. After all, it's Valentine's."

Luke rolled his eyes. Mark's disappointment was palpable, and now he was going to have to explain himself, and that was just going to make him feel worse.

"You know," Violet said, even as Luke opened up his mouth to speak, "I'm fairly willing to guess that Valentine's just doesn't hold the same impact for Luke that it does for you. After all, it's just the anniversary of the most disastrous day of his life to him."

"Second-most disastrous," Luke corrected her.

"What are you ta--oh. Right." Violet looked down at her plate and sighed. "Sorry. It's just... your mum is so happy, I always sort of... forget about your dad."

"That's sort of a good thing," Luke said. "It means things are a lot better than they used to be."

"Well," Teddy said, "You two are going to be on your own anyways this afternoon. Violet and I are planning on spending a little time alone."

"Don't make Professor Shelly get out her shotgun," Luke said.

"We won't" Violet replied cheerfully. 

"Yeah," Teddy added. "We're too clever to get caught."

Violet punched him.

Classes that day dragged on interminably, and by the time Luke was back in the Great Hall, playing chess with Mark, he was starting to seriously reconsider Mark's offer of an opportunity to nip off somewhere a little more private. He said as much in an undertone to Mark, and Mark just grinned and said, "If you want to, you ought to."

"You're a terrible person to give me advice on that," Luke said. "You're just about the most biased person I could go to."

Mark took Luke's rook, and Luke took his pawn, and they looked back up across the board at each other again.

"You know it wouldn't mean anything if we did, right?" Luke said.

"Absolutely," Mark said. "You'd just be having a bit of therapy. Like on the train."

Luke looked back down at the chessboard. Seven more turns. Mark took Luke's other rook, in exchange for his own remaining knight and another pawn. Suddenly they were evenly matched, staring across the board at each other, until Runel's voice said, from behind Luke, "Queen to E4, queen takes bishop, check. You can force him into checkmate in five turns."

Luke turned and gave Runel the dirtiest look he could imagine. "Did I ask you for help?"

"He's right, though," Mark said. 

Luke got up, grunting in disgust. "I'm going to go to bed for a bit."

Mark got a disappointed look on his face, and he got up and followed Luke out of the Great Hall. "Luke, wait."

Luke kept up a brisk pace, not slowing one bit for Mark. "Ever since this time last year, Runel's treated me like I'm his liege lord, because I tortured him in the hallway. It's not right, Mark. Sometimes I want to order him to bully me just so that I can be normal again, but that wouldn't work. I don't bloody want minions. I want friends. If Runel was my friend, I'd be just fine with it, but he's not. He's my underling, and I didn't ask for an underling, don't need an underling, don't want an underling, don't deserve an underling, and shouldn't have an underling."

"Would you really want that blood-purist horror show of a human being for a friend, though?" Mark said.

"No."

"Then maybe it's better to have him think he ought to obey you. That way, he doesn't bother you too much."

"No," Luke said. "I don't think that's quite right. If I make people obey my every whim just so that they won't bother me, that makes me no better than... well, okay, no, but it's something that Voldemort would have done."

"If you're always comparing yourself to Voldemort," Mark said, "You'll never have time to live your own life. You do know that, right?"

Luke stopped short. In the silence of the corridor, he could hear his footsteps echoing around. "That actually makes a hell of a lot of sense," he said.

Mark nodded. "It ought to," he said. "I think about it a lot. I really wish I knew a spell to just make your life easier. You're my best friend, after all. Even if... you know..."

Luke reached out and grabbed Mark's hand, ready to pull him close for a kiss, and of course, of course, someone somewhere around a corner chose that moment to cough, and Luke jumped nearly out of his skin and dropped Mark's hand. The moment was thoroughly gone now. "I'll see you around, Mark."

Mark nodded. "I'll see you," he said.

Luke walked the rest of the way to the Slytherin dungeon with only his footsteps for company. He gave the password to the wall and went to bed, and collapsed onto his four-poster and was just getting a book out when he realized that there was nobody around who could see him. He had no alibi. He sat bolt upright--and realized rather abruptly that he was actually very sleepy, and the covers were very warm and inviting. He curled up and went to sleep.

When Luke walked in to breakfast the next day, he was not in a dark mood. Dark moods were for days when you were feeling a little plagued by the past. Luke was in a full-blown rage. When he woke up, he'd realized that someone had put a sleeping charm on him as he realized that he'd made a mistake, and he'd felt the warning trickle of cold rage that had signaled the beginning of his loss of control a year before, and clamped down hard on it, and he was continuing to keep a tight hold on it, but it was getting easier as the immediate cause of the anger became more remote. The Hufflepuff seeker had been attacked this time. Whoever was sabotaging Luke was doing an incredible job of it, and he wanted very much to find them and bash their brains in with a beater's bat. Runel believed more than ever that Luke was behind the attacks, and Professor Longbottom's opinion had flipflopped when he heard that Luke had spent the entire day in a terrible mood. Only Luke's friends--and Professors Leiman and Shelly--believed him

By the end of the day, he had calmed the little trickle of Voldemort-rage, but when he slept that night, he dreamt of a cold, high, piercing voice whispering vengeance in his ear.  
It might have been his imagination, and it might not have been.

\-------------------------

Game day finally arrived more than a month of absolutely mind-numbing boredom later. Luke was fully expecting the Hufflepuffs to be the hardest team to beat. Their beaters were aggressive, their chasers were downright scary, their keeper looked as though he worked as a seawall on the summers, and the whole team was just generally skilled. 

He got out onto the pitch, his shoes squelching in the mud, and the Hufflepuffs' lead chaser stepped forward to shake Luke's hand. When Luke stuck his hand out for the traditional handshake, the big, impressive, scary sixth year cringed back from him.

Luke sighed, shook the other boy's hand anyways, and mounted up his broom.

It was, at least, much better weather than last time. Clouds hung low overhead, making an empty threat of rain, and the air was clear of fog. Visibility was excellent, and Luke couldn't have asked for better quidditch weather without getting greedy and making temperature requests. It was probably going to be a short game, since the visibility was so good. Madam Hooch blew her whistle, and sent the quaffle skyward, and Luke snatched it out of the air with hardly a problem in the world. In fact, the Hufflepuff chaser seemed to have completely lost his edge. He'd been frankly intimidating against Gryffindor and Ravenclaw, but he was a pussycat up against Luke, who, aside from Violet, was the youngest player in the entire school. In fact, Violet was thirteen already. That made Luke definitely the absolute youngest player in the school. Which meant that the fact that he was winning so handily here was ridiculous. It was almost as though the big Hufflepuff was afraid...

Oh.

Luke ran the quaffle in for a goal on automatic. He wasn't entirely sure how he felt about taking advantage of the other chaser's fear of him, but he wasn't about to let his house down. Luke retrieved the quaffle and listened for the crack of beaters' bats. The bludgers were somewhere towards the other end of the pitch, but that probably wasn't going to last long. Luke whirled for another run at the goalpost, and nodded to himself as he heard the approaching bludgers and their associated beaters. 

He made another goal. The Hufflepuff keeper was barely even trying. As Luke retrieved the quaffle again, with Jeremy and Cassandra flying guard behind him, pushing off the occasional halfhearted effort by the Hufflepuffs, the beaters finally made it to Luke's end of the pitch. Phineas was being a showoff, and he backhanded one of the bludgers towards one of the Hufflepuff chasers. Or at least, that was probably his target. The bludger wound up headed straight for Luke. It wouldn't be a terribly powerful blow, but there was no way Luke could dodge it, and even as the commentator noted that that was going to cost the Slytherins, a beater's bat swung into Luke's vision and the Hufflepuff attached to it cast a worried glance Luke's way and edged his broom a few feet further from Luke than it had been. 

Luke sat there on his broom for a moment, utterly dumbstruck. He'd never actually had an epiphany before, and the fact that his first one was all about sports and schoolyard intrigue was sort of depressing, but when the penny dropped, you couldn't really choose where it would land.

The whole Hufflepuff team was afraid of him.

Slytherin was no match for Hufflepuff.

But if Hufflepuff was actually afraid to win...

Luke looked up and saw the Hufflepuff seeker diving after the Slytherin seeker, and not doing a very good job of it. Menteith came up with the snitch.

\----------------------------

"So.. you think someone on your own team is framing you." Teddy stared at Luke, sighed. "I wouldn't believe it out of anyone but you. You're stuck with the Slytherins, though. What are you going to do about it?"

Luke took a deep breath and looked over at Violet. "I'm going to ask you for help," he said.

Luke had spoken to his friends immediately after the game, and now they were sitting under cover of about a dozen different anti-spying charms in the Great Hall, including a handy one that made it look to anyone trying to see as though they were under no anti-spying charms. Violet shook her head. "What do you want me to do, Luke?"

"I want you to get the Gryffindors to beat the hell out of me on the ninth."

Violet stared at him. "Why?"

Luke grinned. "You're going to believe that I might really be a Slytherin after I explain this to you. You see, the quidditch teams are all afraid of me for what they think I'm going to do off the pitch. The beaters don't come after me, the keepers are afraid of me, the seekers are afraid to humiliate the Slytherins... But if you pound on me with a bludger, and if you get Martins to pound on me with a bludger, I'll be out of commission for the game. Then, we can catch whoever is framing me when they're trying to take revenge on you and Martins."

"How?" Mark asked.

"Yeah," Violet said. "I may be able to set whoever it is on fire if you want, but I can't find out who they are."

Luke's smile got even wider than it had been before. "They're using Polyjuice. They have to be. But there's more than one that can play at that game. I can get ahold of enough Polyjuice for it. I need enough for... oh, say.. four doses. That's it." He rested his head in his hands and went on, "And you could set them on fire, Violet?"

She sighed. "I did sort of let it slip, didn't I? It's a secret, I really shouldn't tell you guys." she seemed to be wrestling with it for a few moments and then, finally, she said, "I'm a Firestarter. I can create and control fire with my mind, but the ability develops at the onset of puberty. It's really rare, but it's genetic. My dad has it too. That's why he could control the fires. The thing about Firestarters, though, is that... it's magical fire. It won't hurt me, except by what it heats up, but it will hurt other people. And other magic can't control it. My dad put a spell on me to check if I had the ability over the summer, and it turned out I do. That's really rare, to have two in a family living at the same time. When I lost it in the Great Hall, he took me to a monastery. I don't know where, but... they're called the League of the Sacred Flame. They keep it a secret, because Firestarters are sworn to secrecy. We're dangerous even to wizards and witches, because only another Firestarter can put down our flames."

"I've heard rumors that there was such a thing as Firestarters," Mark said, "But only from my uncle. The one who explored old tombs and stuff. He thought they must be extinct, though."

Violet grinned. "Nope. There's not a lot of us, though. Maybe a few hundred, in the whole world." She chuckled. "It's sort of like the International Statute of Secrecy. Like I'm some kind of a superwitch."

\-------------------------

"All right," Professor Leiman said. "Let me get this straight." He heaved a profound sigh. "You want Polyjuice potion, which you are sure that I have a bountiful stock of. You want enough to pretend to be someone else for four hours, or for you and all of your friends to pretend to be someone else each for one hour. Prove to me that you would be able to use it effectively, and I'll think about telling you if I even have any Polyjuice."

Luke took a deep breath. He had explained his suspicions already, and Professor Leiman agreed that if Phineas had done what Luke thought, something needed to be done about it. Where Luke and Professor Leiman disagreed was where Luke thought that that something involved Polyjuice. But Luke's plan was good enough that he was sure he could convince Professor Leiman. All he had to do was present it right.

About an hour later, Professor Leiman, laughing, opened up a drawer in his desk, reached in, and retrieved four large vials of bubbling grey goo. Luke was aware, intellectually, that raw Polyjuice was incredibly unappetizing, but he wasn't quite prepared for just how mind-bendingly gross-looking the stuff was. Some little hindbrain bit of him was screaming an objection to the fact that he was going to be drinking this stuff. It looked like something that bubbled up from the ground near a toxic waste dump. 

"It's times like this," Professor Leiman said, "That I wish someone would hurry up and invent a magical camcorder. If you pull this off, you'll experience a moment that few people ever get to really enjoy: the moment when your adversary realizes that they have completely, irrevocably lost. Enjoy that moment, Luke. Enjoy it as completely as you can, because it doesn't come often."

\-----------------------

With his plan complete, Luke found himself waiting impatiently for the ninth of April. March dragged on interminably, cold and wet and muddy and unpleasant. He played chess with Mark, and exchanged the occasional anger-filled glance with Marissa, and talked endlessly about banal things with Violet and Teddy, and he wanted to be able to go somewhere and do something, anything, so long as it was something that you could only do in private, just to reassure himself that he still remembered how to do private things. He had actually caught himself announcing to the Great Hall in general that he was off to the bathroom once or twice, and that was simply not acceptable. The next quidditch game was Hufflepuff versus Ravenclaw. Hufflepuff won easily, so that Gryffindor, Hufflepuff and Slytherin were all tied with each other at two games apiece, but Luke suspected that Hufflepuff was by far the better team. The way they flew, the way they behaved as a team, it was all flawless, lacking, perhaps professional polish, but flawless nonetheless, as Luke told Mark while they watched the game. 

"They're just that good," he said. "I think the only reason Slytherin beat them last time is me. I mean... The Hufflepuffs move like they're dancing, but Slytherin moves like a military unit. It's not adaptable."

Mark shrugged and huddled into his robes. The March chill was fading, but it was still present, and Mark was small enough that he wouldn't retain heat very well. Luke pointed his wand at Mark and said "Thermia."

Mark stopped shivering. "Thanks," he said. "I didn't want to try that myself. The last time I did, I wound up--"

"Sunburned," Luke said. "Yeah, I know." He dropped his hand down to the damp, cold wood of the bench beneath him and slid it over until he found Mark's. They watched the game hand-in-hand, while Violet and Teddy lounged on the bench in front of them. Ostensibly, the stands were supposed to be separated by house, but that never happened. Luke, for one, was happy about that. It meant he got to be with all his friends. It also meant he got to sit there, holding hands with Mark and wondering if that meant he wanted to hold hands with Mark a lot more, or if he was just trying it on to see how it fit, but it was at least an opportunity to try and work it out for himself. 

Mark went back to the Hufflepuff common room happy that night, even though Luke reminded him that he still wasn't entirely sure about what their relationship really was. Mark had simply pointed out that he was young and had all the time in the world to wait, and Luke found himself wishing Mark hadn't put it quite so... tragically.

Still, boyfriends or not, Luke and Mark had never been closer. Something about seeing Luke's Machiavellian side had appealed to Mark, or so it seemed, and he had gotten into the habit of detailing complicated schemes to Luke during their chess matches. Partially, Luke knew, it was an effort to distract his attention away from the game, but the thing was, it was amusing to hear Mark go on about how to set up a chain reaction of people casting cheering charms on each other, or how to dose the oceans with a potion that would eventually make all the muggles get wise to magic and not mind its presence at all. Some of Mark's schemes were different than that. He had an ever-shifting idea for a way to achieve world domination. It actually involved using his magic-granting necklace as a portkey in order to first bribe and then betray various world leaders. The workability of the idea was a bit frightening, but the fact that it changed every time Mark detailed it was enough to make it obvious that Mark had no intention of ever using it (although Luke sometimes wondered whether that was because Mark was too good a person, or because he was too much of a perfectionist).

Again a quidditch game approached, and Luke found himself walking to the stands with Mark. It was Gryffindor versus Hufflepuff, and so Teddy, having decided that Ravenclaw had no hope of winning this year--which they didn't, since they had lost too many games already--was decked out in Gryffindor red and gold in front of them. Luke recalled a story Professor Shelly had told once of a Ravenclaw girl who showed her support for the Gryffindor team during a match by wearing a hat with a lion's head on it that roared when tapped with a wand. Teddy wasn't quite at that charming point of craziness yet, but his hair was red and gold, and Luke thought there was every possibility that Teddy's skin would change to match during the game. He knew Teddy could do it, but it took effort; he had once done it in first year, after an incident where Runel turned himself blue in Transfigurations. Teddy had sat down next to Runel with bright, shiny silver skin, and cheerfully announced that he appreciated Runel's newfound support for Ravenclaw.  
Luke had raised only token objection to Runel's hexing Teddy over it.

They climbed up to the steps into the stands, and Luke and Mark sat together again. This time, Luke didn't hold Mark's hand. Hufflepuff won again, a little less handily, but still with remarkable ease, and as they left the stands, Luke found himself thinking about the fact that next game was his turn, and he would be getting pounded into the ground, quite possibly thrown off his broomstick, by more bludgers than anyone could possibly handle. The way Violet and Harry Martins had handled those bludgers out there, Luke was pretty sure there was no chance of his not getting unseated.

The night before the game, he worked himself up into a panic. Yes, Professor Leiman would be there waiting for him to be unseated. Yes, Professor Leiman was a man that Luke would trust with his life. He was still afraid of what might happen. For all that he was putting his personal safety in the hands of the sort of man who could face down a dragon armed with only a rifle, he was scared. He told Mark as much when they left the Great Hall for their common rooms at curfew time.

"You're doing something very brave to keep anyone from being able to attack someone disguised as you again," Mark said. "I think it's very noble and good, and more than a bit Gryffindor. But you know what? I like it when you get all Gryffindor. You do good things when you get all Gryffindor. You remember that time Runel stole my chocolate frog after Herbology--"

"And I punched him in the nose," Luke finished. "How could I forget? That had to have been the most satisfying way I ever lost house points."

Mark was grinning at the memory of the look on Runel's face. It had been utterly priceless. "Thank you," Mark said. "For being so... so good."

"I'm not that good," Luke said. "I'm just trying to do the right thing."

Mark shook his head, and then he leaned over and kissed Luke on the lips, as natural as you please, like it was something he did every night before he went to bed. "Goodnight, Luke," he said, and he wandered off toward the Hufflepuff common room.

\-----------------------

Game day. Luke was just a bit nauseated. He felt like a man going to his execution. When the analogy had first popped into his head earlier in the day, he'd had a laughing fit over the fact that someone who was debating a relationship with another boy was facing the possibility (however slight) of death by flying balls. He'd been too embarrassed to share the reasoning behind his laughing fit with anyone, and Teddy was of the opinion that Luke had snapped under the strain. 

Luke didn't deny it. In a lot of ways, this whole plan was a way of snapping under the strain. It was just a very controlled, careful snap that didn't involve losing control to the incredibly powerful dark wizard that lived in the back of Luke's head. Luke looked over at Violet and smiled nervously. He was fairly sure the best way to describe the look on his face would have involved the use of the word "rictus," but he felt that at least trying was a necessity.

Luke mounted up and rose into the air on his broom, and there was Harry Harcourt across from him again, grinning like the cat that ate the canary. "Ready to lose again?"

"Not really," Luke said, "But then, at least I have a choice in the matter."

"Yeah," Harcourt said. "You can choose... to lose."

Luke started whistling, trying to pick out the tune of Slytherin's unofficial quidditch song, Weasley is Our King. Luke knew enough about wizarding politics to know that there had never been a Weasley that wasn't in Gryffindor (one of only two families that had ever been all in one house), so on the face of it, the choice of song was a bit odd, but the lyrics were astonishingly insulting, so it all balanced out fairly nicely.

He didn't get too far before Madam Hooch's whistle blew, and the quaffle was snatched away from him by Harcourt, and Luke decided that he ought to make a showing of it, and went after Harcourt. About five minutes later, he dodged the first bludger and passed the quaffle to Cassandra, only to have it knocked off course by another bludger, this one accompanied by a triumphant yell from Violet, and he was staring in open-mouthed and unfeigned astonishment when there was a loud crack behind him, and he whirled around to see a rapidly expanding bludger, which hit him square in the nose. Luke nearly fell off his broom right then and there, but he managed to keep a hold in spite of everything. 

The quidditch pitch had gone silent. Harry Martins was sweeping around, moving to intercept the other bludger, and everyone was watching the crazy boy who dared to attack the most dangerous student in the entire school. Luke pushed down the urge to smile as Martins, with an actual, audible yell of triumph, sent the bludger racing at him, and a second crack from behind was enough to tell him that this attack was well-coordinated. He did a few quick mental gymnastics and dodged Violet's bludger, right into Harry's.  
It hit him in the head again, and everything went away.

\-----------------------

Luke woke up in the infirmary. He had a splitting headache, enough to tell him that he had a concussion again. The severity of the headache was enough to tell him that this concussion was worse.

“Who's here?” Luke said. 

There was a squeeze on his hand, and Mark's voice said “Me, Teddy, Violet, and Runel.”

“Good,” Luke said. “Runel, I need to talk with you in a minute. Where's Madam Pom--”

The venerable old healer came bustling up to Luke's bedside with a dose of concussion potion. She made Luke drink it, and Luke felt better within a few moments. He pulled his hand out of Mark's grasp and looked up at Madam Pomfrey. “Am I free to go?”

“Yes, dear, but you really need to stop getting concussed. It's just... awful for your health.”

“I'm not planning on doing it any more than I have to,” Luke said. He stood up and grabbed Runel by the sleeve, leading the other Slytherin out into the hallway, down the corridor, and into a bathroom.

“Hieronymus,” he said, “I need your hair.”

“What?” Runel said.

Luke reached into his pocket and drew out the four vials of Polyjuice. 

“I stole these from Professor Leiman before the game. I thought the Gryffindors were going to pull something, and I thought I might have to count on you. I can't retaliate again, not without getting expelled. But if you happened to attack them... well, you see where I'm going. I need you to take...” He pulled the stopper off of two of the vials and plucked out a couple of hairs from his head, which he dropped into the potion. It turned a decidedly odd color that was exactly halfway between green and yellow. “Take these, go to the dormitories, and rest. Say you've got a headache. I know I do. When the first one wears off, take the second one. Stay on my bed. I've left a book by the bedside. Read that. I'll go disguised as you and get my revenge.”

Runel stared at Luke for a minute, and then he grinned and plucked a couple of hairs from his head and dropped them into the other two vials. The potion turned a dark purplish color, the exact shade of a three-day-old bruise. Luke handed over the vials that would let Runel turn into him, and downed one of the vials that would turn him into Runel, and there was the most perfectly awful crawling sensation he'd ever felt under his skin. Luke started shedding his clothes.

“What are you doing?” Runel said.

Luke rolled his eyes. “I can't very well go around wearing my clothes and pass for you, can I? We need to switch clothes. God, this is uncomfortable.” He swore softly as his feet shrank down about a size and a half, and Runel swore a little more loudly as his feet grew too large for his shoes, and pretty soon, they each knew exactly what it was like to look at themselves through the other's eyes.

Luke found that whatever sympathy he had for Runel didn't extend so far as to keep him from using the other boy's eagerness to help with mischief one bit.

They switched clothes in a very businesslike manner, and headed back to the common room together, Luke instructing Runel the whole way. Finally, Runel went into the dormitories, and Luke sat down and glared sullenly around. From the looks on the other Slytherins' faces, it was pretty obvious that the game had gone badly. Sure enough, a few minutes after Runel disappeared into the dormitory, the door slipped open and shut too quietly to disturb a reading boy, and Luke watched in fascination as his own head appeared, hovering in midair.

He'd known about the audiences his imposter had taken to gathering, but the invisibility cloak was a new twist. His voice came out of the imposter's mouth. “Let's go.”

It took perhaps half an hour of wandering around the castle for the Slytherins, with Luke at their head and Luke tagging along behind in disguise, to find Harry Martins, looking terrified in exactly the corridor Violet had arranged for him to be in, surrounded by about a dozen first and second year students. 

Ostensibly, those students combined should have been assumed to be no match for Luke. They didn't break and run, and the imposter ignored it.

Big mistake.

Luke watched as the imposter stalked up to Martins and said, in a cold, high voice that sounded nothing like the Voldemort Voice Luke was all too familiar with, “So, thought you'd attack me, eh?”

The imposter raised his wand, and Luke stepped out of the crowd. 

“Actually,” he said, “That was my idea. You see, the whole Polyjuice thing was easy, but I had to make you choose the target I wanted you to choose. Thanks for the help, by the way, Harry. I couldn't have done it without you.”

“What's going on here?” the imposter said.

And Professor Leiman stepped around the corner. “I'd like to know the same thing. Thank you for the tip, Luke. You're Hieronymus Runel right now, then?”

Luke raised up his wand, pointed it at the imposter, and snapped “Homorphus Veritas!”

The imposter gained about a foot and a half of height. And breasts. Eloise Parker collapsed to the floor, writhing in pain as her feet overfilled her shoes. Luke carefully removed Runel's shoes from his feet and then cast the spell on himself. He stepped over to Eloise. “You see, this is why you don't mess with the League of Interhouse Friendship,” he said. He bent down and muttered a couple of spells at the shoes that were constricting her feet so painfully. They split open and she stopped yelling in pain. “It just doesn't end well,” Luke said, “And you wind up humiliated because you went and bullied some Gryffindor or a Hufflepuff, or a Ravenclaw, or even another Slytherin.”

He looked up at Professor Leiman. Professor Leiman smiled. “Book 'em, Dano,” he said, and then he walked over to Eloise and pulled her up. She looked utterly ridiculous in the overtight clothes she was wearing, and Luke was willing to bet that she would have to be cut out of them. Luke turned to walk away, and someone started clapping behind him, and then someone else, and pretty soon all the Gryffindors in the corridor behind him were clapping. And then, Professor Leiman, at the end of the hall, turned around and said, “By the way. To Luke, for excellent detective work, thirty points to Slytherin. To Harry, for bravery in the face of danger, thirty points to Gryffindor. Excellent work, boys.” Professor Leiman turned and walked down the hallway, headed for the headmaster's office. The Slytherins started applauding, too.

\--------------------------

Runel was not happy. He made every effort to conceal it, but he wasn't happy. When he discovered he'd been tricked, he went into a sulk that impressed the hell out of Luke. 

Luke's own sulking skills had never reached that level.

Marissa, on the other hand, was impressed, and looked like she was properly chastened as well.

Chastened or not, Luke avoided her for two days, until she finally caught up with him in the corridors after Charms.

“Luke,” she said, “I'm sorry.”

“Sorry?” Luke said. “No you're not. You heard a rumor, and instead of listening to your friends, you decided that I must be evil, that you should stop associating with me.” he stopped short and turned to Marissa. “You stopped talking to me, you didn't listen when I told you that I wasn't the one doing it, you just... assumed. You don't trust me any more than you did when you thought I was too dangerous to have in the school last year. You behaved in what my mother would call an 'utterly contemptible manner,' and I really ought to let you suffer the consequences and stop calling you my friend altogether.”

Marissa backed off a step at the tightly controlled fury in Luke's voice. “Luke,” she said, “I'm sorry, I really, really am. Please, don't do this.”

“Do you remember the last conversation we had, Marissa? The one in the bathroom?” Marissa nodded, and Luke took a deep breath. “Back then,” he said, “I was fairly sure I was going to be asking you out by the end of the year. We would have had a really fun summer, I'm sure. Now, that's not going to happen. That's never going to happen, because the minute you decide to get a little bit suspicious of me, you'll have a little freakout, and then you'll have a little breakdown, and then you'll push me away like last week's garbage. You were one of my best friends, Marissa. You were one of the few people I could really say that I loved, one way or another. And then you went and you threw that away, because you didn't trust me. You're welcome back at our table any time you want to come back, but don't expect me to be ecstatic to have you.” Luke turned and walked away from her, headed down to Herbology.

When he arrived late, flushed with anger and with Marissa on his heels, pretty much everyone jumped to the same conclusion. 

“Taking her back just like that?” Mark whispered.

“No,” Luke said. “I'm furious with her, if you must know. Which I think you must, actually. She doesn't trust me in the least, and she's only gone and proved it twice. She's lucky I'm willing to give her a chance to be my friend.”

“So... you're not asking her out, then? You know, everybody is going to think you two stopped for a quick snog.”

“They can think what they want,” Luke said. He reached into the Hunkerdown bush and pulled out a seed pod so harshly that the plant let out a squeal of protest. Mark started soothing the bush, petting it while its leaves slowly came unfurled. “The truth is that it took an effort not to slap her. She wanted to pick up where we left off. As though she had gone off to the store to pick up a few things, instead of abandoning the four of us, and rejecting any attempt at conversation for four months.” He reached into the plant again and started pulling a little more gently at the seed pods. “She is the most fickle, unreasonable, intractable, disagreeable girl in the world.”

“You don't really think that,” Mark said.

Luke sighed. “No,” he said. “I don't. But it's not for lack of trying to. I really want to hate her right now, Mark. Is that a bad thing?”

“I think it's probably good. You want to hate someone, but you can't make yourself hate them. It's just not a sign of a bad person.” 

Luke finished pulling out seed pods and started petting the plant so that Mark could get his hands in on the other side. “I suppose you're right,” he said. “But I really, really want to hate her.” 

“Maybe you just can't make yourself do it,” Mark said, pulling out a few seed pods. The bush was practically purring under his ministrations. If it had been capable of purring, it probably would have been doing it. As it was, it was helping him to get the seed pods with little movements that brought them into reach, and Mark's speech was punctuated with the occasional “thank you” directed at the bush. “I mean,” he said, “she is the only other Slytherin who thinks the way you do, about blood purity and that whole being sly thing, and ambition not being the thing that ought to determine what your life is all about.” He pulled another handful of seed pods out and added, “Even if she is a little bitch sometimes.”

“Goodness, Mark,” Luke said. “Did you just swear?”

Mark was bright red in his yellow Hufflepuff robes. The overall effect was actually pretty cute. “Sometimes,” he said, “the situation just sort of calls for it.”

\---------------------------

Luke kept expecting Phineas to kick him off the team. He was sure that Phineas wasn't going to want him without the other students' fear in place to ensure victory, but the captain never said anything, never so much as hinted that he wanted Luke off the team. There was a certain amount of logic to it. Any replacement he got now would be so out of practice as to be almost as bad as Luke himself. Phineas did seem to know he was going to lose, though. As they stepped out onto the pitch for their game against Ravenclaw, he muttered to Luke, “I hope you're happy. I wanted to get at least one quidditch cup under my belt, and now, thanks to you, I'm about to lose to Ravenclaw.”

“Maybe you ought to have tried for skill instead of intimidation,” Luke said. “I hear it does wonders for not being terrible. It doesn't really matter, though. Hufflepuff's won every game they've played in except that one against us. You know, the one where we were cheating. They're obviously the best team.”

“Intimidation is not cheating,” Phineas said. “You're not allowed to threaten, but we never threatened anyone.”

Luke shrugged and took his position facing off against the Ravenclaw chaser. Madam Hooch stepped forward and the teams mounted up and rose into the air. “I don't suppose you're afraid of me?” Luke said.

The Ravenclaw shook his head. “Not really, no. Not after that whole Gryffindor thing.”

“Good,” Luke said. “Shall we?”

The Ravenclaws destroyed them. Luke expected as much, really. With so few people going to Slytherin lately, there was really no way that there were enough decent quidditch players in Slytherin to make a formidable team. In a way, it was sort of depressing. After all, Phineas had been dealt a lousy hand when he was made captain of the Slytherin quidditch team. He'd used whatever tactics he could to try to get a victory, and he'd failed miserably. 

He still tried to put Luke up front, but it was sort of a useless gesture. After the Ravenclaws, all that was left was Hufflepuff. Luke took a bludger to the ribs during the game and had to sit out the remainder of it in the infirmary, waiting for his bones to grow back together. When Phineas came around to see him, Luke was entirely unsurprised to learn that Hufflepuff had won.

“Look, Luke,” Phineas said, “Thanks for not quitting the team, all right? I know you were pretty steamed at me.”

“Try being more honest in the future, all right?” Luke said. “It's not your fault Slytherin hasn't got any decent players, but it is your fault if the bad players you have got start having goes at the other teams. You can't let them do that.”

Phineas sighed. “It's not like it matters. No one's ever going to let me captain a quidditch team again. Not after this year.” He heaved an enormous sigh. “It almost worked, though. Too bad you got wise.”

Luke shrugged and immediately regretted it as pain flared in his ribs. “I'll see you in the common room, Phineas.”

\-----------------------

After the Hufflepuff game, the quidditch cup was almost guaranteed to go to Hufflepuff. Luke watched the next game (Hufflepuff versus Ravenclaw) with Mark. Marissa had wanted to come with, but Luke had pointedly told her that he didn't feel like sitting through an awkward hour or two of watching quidditch with her, so Marissa was in the Slytherin stands somewhere, watching alone. When Hufflepuff won, Mark and Luke both cheered for them, and they were still talking about it during lunch on Luke's birthday. 

The second had dawned bright and sunny, so much so that the sunlight filtered down through the lake windows into the Slytherin common rooms. Luke had awoken with a good-day feeling, which was enhanced by the presence of a magical Ludo game with built-in dice at the foot of his bed. There was a big red bow tied around it and a tag that said “From Mark.”

Luke honestly had no idea when he'd mentioned that he wanted one of the games, but he thought it was just like Mark to remember. He folded up the game and stuffed it into his pocket when he went out to breakfast, and he had a good day, which was always nice, and people besides Mark, Violet, Teddy, and Marissa remembered that it was his birthday. He noticed a lot of people wearing his snitch buttons, Professor Shelly included. They had nearly disappeared from the halls while he was suspected of attacking other students, but he'd been seeing them more and more lately. Hogwarts students might be a fickle bunch, but they were at least enthusiastic. 

The quidditch talk began immediately when Luke sat down for lunch, because of course, the last game had secured the cup for Hufflepuff. If Ravenclaw had won, and then Gryffindor, then it would have been a possible tie, to be decided by whether Gryffindor or Hufflepuff had scored the most points over the season, but now Hufflepuff had five victories under their belt to Gryffindor's three. The game on the seventh was just going to be a formality. Eventually, though, Teddy got tired of talking about Hufflepuff being good at quidditch, and his girlfriend's team being not good enough to beat them, and he started singing, very loudly, Werewolves of London, which Luke had looked up and discovered had been written by a wizard and a werewolf and was about a particularly vicious werewolf named Fenrir Greyback, who had once run amok, unsurprisingly, in Kent.

“Wasn't your dad a werewolf?” Luke said.

“Well, yeah,” Teddy replied, “but gran says he loved this song. Probably because it's so sarcastic.” and then he went right on singing until all the most shameless people in the school—Violet and Professor Leiman included--were singing along with him. Professor Leiman, Luke decided, should not be allowed to sing in public. 

Dinner conversation, at least, didn't include quidditch talk or rousing renditions of any songs whatsoever. In fact, dinner was rather subdued, and after the plates had vanished, Luke brought out his new Ludo game, and thanked Mark profusely as though he hadn't already done so, and Violet and Teddy declared themselves a team, Mark and Marissa joined in, and the League played on for a bit, until Marissa finally won, and then Mark and Teddy and Violet. Luke had lost in his first game with it, but he was happy enough just to have it. He folded up the game and put it back into his pocket, and then he looked over at Mark, who was pulling a book out of his bag and looking perfectly detached from the world, and Luke looked around the Great Hall at all the people scattered around the tables, and he spared a glance for Marissa, who was pulling out her wand and starting to practice a difficult transfiguration, and then he looked back at Mark, sitting there with his book in his hand. It was one that Luke had lent to him, a Stephen King book, and Mark was about halfway through. Luke pulled the bookmark out of Mark's hand and put it into the page that he had just taken it out of.

“Hey,” Mark said. “I'm reading.”

“Not anymore,” Luke said. He really had no idea why his heart should be pounding the way it was, but it was anyways. 

He kissed Mark, hard, and Teddy wolf-whistled and Violet exclaimed, “Well, it's about bloody time!” and Luke ignored both of those things and just concentrated on not doing something awkward like mashing his nose too badly against Mark's or something like that.

He let the kiss come to a natural end and then he whispered in Mark's ear, “I think it's safe to say that I'm done thinking about it. Would you like to go for a walk on the grounds this weekend, maybe visit Hagrid, take in the Hufflepuffs demolishing Gryffindor?”

Mark just sat there and gaped at Luke until Violet reached across the table and slapped him on the back of the head. “Say yes, you ninny!”

“Ah,” Mark said. “Ah. Um. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yes I would. That sounds... you know... um... excellent.”

“Good,” Luke said. He draped his arm over Mark's shoulder and pulled the Hufflepuff closer to him. “Now come here. I've been stalling for long enough, I might as well.. aw hell.”  
Marissa had gotten up and walked stiffly away from the table. 

“I'll go talk to her,” Teddy said.

“Thanks,” Luke said, and he turned his attention back to the somewhat dazed Hufflepuff at his side. “Where were we?” he said.

\-----------------------------

The next few days were, as far as Luke was concerned, ample proof that he had waited entirely too long to admit to his feelings for Mark. The other Slytherins teased him mercilessly for taking up with a Hufflepuff, and Marissa was distinctly upset over the whole thing (although she at least tried to be gracious, telling Luke that she was happy for him), and a couple of the muggle-born students made a halfhearted and quickly-quashed effort at teasing him over dating another boy, but Luke was happy despite all of that. 

He would have to inform his mother eventually, and he was entirely unsure about what he was going to say, but he was also entirely willing to put it off until after his first real date—if you could call a walk around the grounds, a school-organized quidditch game, and a visit to Hagrid a date.

He and Mark, Luke discovered, weren't loungers like Violet and Teddy. If anything, they were hand-holders, and the sort of couple that works together on absolutely every school project imaginable (which worked surprisingly well; Luke was better at magic than Mark, and Mark was better academically than Luke. Put together, they were the perfect Hogwarts student), although the working together was something they had done before.

Professor Gills wasn't too happy about it, though. On Wednesday, he asked Luke to come to his office after classes. When Luke arrived, Professor Gills asked him to sit down and gave him a Look of Mild Disapproval for a moment before he said, “I hear tell you've struck up a romance with a Hufflepuff student.”

“If that's all you want to talk about,” Luke said, “then I think I'd rather leave now, unless you're going to recommend gift ideas or date spots.”

“Hear me out, Luke,” Professor Gills said. “Mister Jonson is a fine young man, I know, but surely you must realize that he is hopeless as a wizard. The boy is nearly a squib, and barely able to handle the simplest magic. That he gives good answers on tests is the only reason he has not been held back. You could do far better, and I am worried that you will find yourself sorely disappointed. Please, Luke, try to understand that I am saying this out of concern for you. I do care for you, even if you're not that fond of me, and I hate to see you make a mistake.”

“That's really sad, Professor Gills,” Luke said.

“What is sad, precisely?” Professor Gills asked. 

“Well,” Luke said, “You're so petty and small-minded that you actually believe that everyone measures the worth of a person by how good they are at magic.”

“That is not true at all,” Professor Gills huffed. “As you well know, I'm an advocate for muggle-born equality, and quite fond of your own mother, as you should recall.”

“What does muggle-born equality have to do with not measuring someone's worth by their magical ability?” Luke asked. “Unless you mean to tell me that you think muggle-borns like me ought to be treated fairly even though we're less capable.”

Professor Gills started turning red. “Luke, if you will not see reason--”

“Mark is sweet, and he's very smart, and he's probably the most loyal friend I've ever had. That's why I like him, Professor. Not because I think it's to my advantage to like him. I think this chat is over.”

Luke stood up, and the door to the office opened up for him and he left and went to go find Mark. 

Mark, it turned out, was waiting in the swear-chair room with the rest of his friends. Teddy had been the one to discover that the room also appeared on weekdays if at least five people dropped their drinks on themselves at breakfast, and Luke and his friends had taken to forcing the room to appear in the morning. Luke plopped himself down on the floor at Mark's feet and watched Mark lose at Scrabble, then Teddy reset the game and Luke had to move into a chair to keep Mark from seeing his pieces.

“So what did Tall Dumb and Slytherin want?” Teddy asked. Violet pinched him and he stuck his tongue out at her.

“Professor Gills tried to get me to break up with Mark,” Luke said. “He said that Mark's practically a squib and I could do better. I told him to stuff his wand in it.”

“Hopefully you didn't use those exact words,” Marissa said. “That could lose us house points, even from Professor Gills.”

“No,” Luke said, “I didn't lose us any house points. I wouldn't have minded if I did, though. Some things are worth losing house points over.”

Mark finished putting down “dragon”, and Luke peered down at his tiles, then at the arm of his chair for confirmation that he was allowed to use the word he was thinking of. He added “parsel” to the front of “head' and looked over at Marissa. She added an “s” to the end of “parselhead.”

\---------------------------

Saturday finally arrived, and Luke got up (early), and showered (twice) and dressed (as immaculately as possible), and only when he felt that he was about a quarter as well-groomed as Professor Leiman had made him for his hearing the previous year did he go down to the Great Hall for breakfast. Mark was already there, looking as though he had recently scrubbed himself from head to toe, possibly employing magic as well as soap. His robes, which had been starting to be too small, were fit perfectly to his frame now. Luke commented on it as he sat down.

“Oh, yeah,” Mark said. “Lily Markingham helped me out with that. She said I couldn't possibly leave the common room for a date looking like I'd got my robes secondhand from a goblin, and then she started casting all sorts of spells on me, and I'm pretty sure my hair is never going to be the same.”

“It looks the same,” Luke said, casting a glance at the well-combed cinnamon-brown mass on top of Mark's head. “Maybe a little more neat than usual, but nothing else. I don't think it's even been trimmed.”

In lieu of a reply, Mark reached up, grabbed a lock of his hair, and moved it over to the left. It snapped back into place the instant he let go.

“Cool,” Luke said. “Not even Teddy can do that.”

“That's because it's a charm, not a metamorphosis,” Teddy said.

Luke and Mark ate hurriedly and then they headed out to the grounds. The weather was warm and sunny, and they weren't the only couple out for a stroll. Hagrid himself was coming out of the Forbidden Forest with a thestral in tow, but Charlie, his apprentice, was following behind him. Luke wasn't fond of Charlie, so he didn't point out the two tending to the thestral. Mark, being a squib, probably couldn't have seen the creature even if he had seen the prerequisite death. 

They found a spot on the lakeshore and watched the bolder students swimming. The giant squid had never been known to attack anyone, but it still took a lot of nerve to swim in the lake, especially if you were a Slytherin and had therefore been startled once or twice by the sound of the squid's tentacles thumping into the windows in the common room. It was, after all, an animal that could reach sixty feet and weigh nearly half a ton, and even if it was friendly, Luke didn't particularly want to know what it was like to encounter it in the water.

Mark started building a sand castle, and Luke joined him, using magic to help shape the walls. By the time the quidditch game was about to start, they had built up a five-foot-high replica of Hogwarts, albeit not a very accurate one.

“Do you want to go and watch the game?” Luke said when the other students started towards the pitch.

Mark looked up, and then looked back down at the sand castle, and then he looked up at Luke, and he grinned. “No,” he said. “I'd like to stay here. I mean, Hufflepuff's already won the cup, and Violet said we don't have to be there if we don't want to.”

Only one other couple—a pair of Ravenclaws—seemed to think the same way, staying behind and swimming instead of working on a sand castle. Luke built up the courtyard and Mark helped him to start on the quidditch pitch. After the third attempt at putting in the scoring rings failed, Mark let out a frustrated little cry of dismay and waved his wand at the little diorama. It gave a feeble little twitch and did nothing else, and Mark sat down in the sand. “This is bloody impossible,” he complained. “Our scoring rings just aren't big enough. They keep snapping.”

Luke pointed his wand, snapped “Reparo”, and stepped over the little pitch to sit next to Mark. He threw his arm over Mark's shoulder, and grinned. “We've done pretty good everywhere else,” he said. “The courtyard turned out especially good.”

Mark rolled his eyes. “You used magic for the courtyard. I mean, come on. It's got little trees in it.”

“They started out as twigs,” Luke said. “It wasn't that hard. The hard part was getting the walls so high without having them collapse.” He grinned. “Well, that and the overhang by the Astronomy Tower.”

Mark snuggled up against Luke's side, and Luke kissed him.

By the time they were done snogging, the quidditch game had been over for a few minutes. A little bit of discussion led them off to Hagrid's hut.

The amiable old half-giant pulled open the door and broke out into his customary huge grin. 

“Luke!” he said. “And ye brough' yer boyfriend, how nice. Here for a visit, then?”

“Yes sir,” Luke said. “Would you mind?”

“O' course not,” Hagrid said. He let them inside, and the three of them chatted over tea, which was actually quite good, and scones that may have been banned by the Geneva Convention.

All told, it was a very pleasant evening, and when Luke walked Mark back to the Hufflepuff common room, he kissed him goodnight as though it was something he did all the time. 

“I'll see you in the morning,” Luke said. “Try not to bite down too hard on anything until you've recovered from that scone.”

“Yeah,” Mark said. “I know he's a wonderful person, and really, I love Hagrid to death, he's so nice... but he really ought to put a warning label on his door. 'Caution, do not consume food in this house.'”

Luke laughed and headed off to the Slytherin common rooms, feeling very light on his feet.

When he arrived, Marissa was waiting for him in one of the big squashy armchairs, and Luke thought, _Oh boy, I'm about to get a facefull of irritability._

“Luke,” Marissa said, “would you sit down?”

Luke tried not to sigh too loudly as he sat.

“Luke,” Marissa said, “I know I've been really cross at you lately. But... well, Violet and Teddy were talking to me earlier, and they said that I really had done the worst possible thing I could for our friendship. I'm sorry. I wish I could make it up to you. I really do. But I know I'll just have to prove I'm a better friend than I have been. I just... I just wanted to tell you that. And that... that I hope you and Mark are happy together. I really do, because I want you to be happy.”

“Thank you, Marissa,” Luke said. She stood up and headed back to the girls' dormitories, and Luke said, “Marissa, wait.” She stopped short, and he got up, crossed the room, and hugged her, a tight, comforting embrace. “You ought to be happy, too, you know. If you ever need to talk about anything, or if you need my help... You know I'll be there. All right?”

She nodded, and Luke thought he saw tears welling up in her eyes before she turned and walked the rest of the way back to the dormitories.

Luke went to go write a letter to his mother.

\--------------------------

The next few weeks were actually normal, which Luke thought was entirely too weird. He and Mark continued to have little dates every weekend, and when the signups began for the next year's elective courses, they discussed in depth what they wanted to take, and both agreed that taking a class just because the other one was in it would be extremely silly. Teddy and Violet seemed to be of a different opinion on the matter, and signed up for almost entirely the same classes. Luke decided to take Care of Magical Creatures despite the rumors about Hagrid's having brought in a manticore once. Luke could only hope that Hagrid wouldn't retire from teaching before the end of his time at Hogwarts, because it seemed likely that he would then be replaced by Charlie Weasley, and Luke didn't want to find a dragon waiting for him in class someday.

Exams began the first week of June for the second years, and Luke was fairly confident that he had passed all of them, with the possible exception of Transfigurations, with flying colors. Mark, naturally, had gone through his own exams like a hot knife through butter, especially herbology.

Finally, the last day of classes came to an end, and the whole school went to the farewell feast. The Great Hall was decked out in Gryffindor colors for the occasion, just like the year before, and Professor Longbottom was beaming happily while Professor Shelly, Professor Orkney, and Professor Gills all gave him sour looks. Luke thought it was a little ridiculous for the Herbology teacher to be that happy. His Gryffindors had a staggering numerical advantage, after all.

Professor Flitwick stood up at the Head Table and gave a little throat clearing, and then he started to speak. “Well, students,” he said. “It has been a long and exciting year, and I have found myself quite pleased with most of you. This year also marks the nearest competition between two houses for the House Cup in five years, with Slytherin trailing behind Gryffindor by a bare thirty points, impressive for so small a number of students. I would like to take a moment to congratulate one of those students on his many Moments of Excellence throughout the year.” The way he spoke made it clear that “Moments of Excellence” was capitalized. 

“Luke Restimen,” Professor Flitwick said, “Saved his dear friend Violet Leiman from terrible injury during her rather distressing attack of accidental magic in the Great Hall, and in the spirit of fair play, he went up against a member of his own house to prevent bullying. I say, bravo, Luke. Bravo!”

Luke felt himself blushing as Professor Flitwick kicked off a wave of applause that lasted for a good thirty seconds and was just as loud from Hufflepuff and Gryffindor as from Slytherin and Ravenclaw. 

\----------------------

The compartment was definitely cramped. They had all debated whether or not to try for taking a compartment together on the train ride home, and had discovered that it was still possible, even though pretty much everyone had grown an inch or two over the last year. It was difficult to squeeze everyone in, though. Still, they made the best of it. Teddy brought out his chinese checkers game, and they played a couple of games, and chatted about the upcoming year and how exciting it was going to be to get to do electives. 

Luke's legs started to cramp up, and he got up and headed out the door, with Mark following along behind him. 

“Are you nervous about talking to my mum when we get to the platform?” Luke asked.

Mark nodded. “A little bit. I mean, I know she says she's all right with it, but it's still... you know, we're courting now, I'd be crazy not to be at least a little nervous.”

Luke shrugged. “She likes you. And I like you.” He pulled Mark into a kiss as the train gave a little lurch. “Actually,” Luke said after a moment's serious consideration, “”I think it would be fair to say that I love you.”

“I love you too,” Mark said. He leaned over to give Luke another kiss, and at that precise moment, the rearward door to the car they were in burst open and Professor Leiman  
rushed in with a handgun in his right hand and his cane at the ready in a way that made it clear he was intending to use it at any moment. 

“Luke!” the professor shouted. “I'm getting you out of here! We've just got word, the—“

He never got to finish the sentence. The train lurched violently to the right, and Mark was thrown against the wall. A spray of bright blood rushed out of Mark's forehead, and Professor Leiman pointed his cane and shouted a spell even as the train went over onto its side, and Luke had a terrifying, jumbled impression of screaming and grinding noises and pain. Somewhere along the line he hit his head, and then...

\--------------------

Luke woke up in darkness. Someone in a dark robe was holding a cup out in front of him, and Luke took it and said, “Thank you.” He drank from the cup, and immediately realized that that was a mistake. The stuff in the cup wasn't water. It was bitter and sour at the same time, but in a completely different way than if you were to simply mix something bitter with something sour. It tasted like it was made of one thing that was both flavors at once.

As soon as he started trying to spit out the liquid, a voice snapped “Imperio,” and a dreamy, detached bliss washed over him. 

_Drink,_ the dreamy feeling suggested, and Luke drank.

As the potion went down his throat, Luke felt the trickle of cold rage start up in the back of his mind. The rage expanded into a flood and warmed, turned from anger to puzzlement to simple existence, a second, half-there awareness, not even a real personality. It was like a tiny fraction of a soul in the back of his head. It was a tiny fraction of a soul in the back of his head.

 _Stand,_ the dreamy feeling said, and he stood. 

He was in a graveyard, surrounded by headstones and light fog. Tall figures in black robes and white masks stood all around him in a circle. His mother was tied to a grave, and Luke realized, in a detachedly happy sort of a way, that it was his father's grave his mother was tied to.

 _Take your wand, and point it at her_ , the feeling said, and Luke raised up his wand and pointed it at his mother.

 _Now,_ the feeling commanded, _With all of your anger and hatred, cast the killing curse._

Luke thought, abstractly, that since he didn't hate his mother, he would have to think of his hatred for someone else. He let a few possible candidates slide through his mind and settled on picturing Professor Gills sitting in his mother's place. 

“Avada Kedavra,” Luke said, and a bolt of bright green light rushed from the end of his wand and struck his mother in the chest. She let out a tiny squeak and died, and the second, fractional soul in the back of Luke's head went away.

No.

It didn't go away, it merged into his mind, a few stray sets of thoughts, and a flood of memories, horrible memories, so terrible that they overwhelmed the Imperius Curse.  
Luke stood there, letting the memories that the fragment of Voldemort's soul carried wash over him. And then he spoke.

He spoke with a different accent than he had before, because all those memories, all that Voldemort had known until the night he first tried to kill Harry Potter, was enough memory to alter an accent, muscle memory and magical memory and oh God the pain he had caused, all the deaths, Lily Potter, and James Potter, and a crying child in a crib as he raised the wand, that precious stick of yew wood, and snapped the killing curse, and how many others, he couldn't remember so much of that life, but he remembered the worst parts, the killing, the tortures, the anger and rage and wanting it all to stop so that he could live in peace, but how far, how far had he gone, when the time came that he raised his wand to Harry Potter's face, how many lives, how deeply entrenched in the pain and the misery and the hatred, the Dark Arts keeping a hold on his soul, the dark fascination of his past, and then a flash of light, and he died in the woods, ripped away from his body, sent off into the darkness, screaming and alone, and forever changed by the time imprisoned in the one who had so effectively destroyed him, so afraid of that soul he had clung to like a life raft in a raging tempest, seeking for shelter, and his mother was dead, his mother was dead because he had killed her, and killed her, and killed her again, and Luke, or Voldemort, or Tom Riddle, whoever he was, he fell to his knees and screamed, and screamed, and screamed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's why I've tagged it "I am mean to my characters".
> 
> Next part coming up tomorrow or the next day.


End file.
